X-Cart forums - Suggestion for X-Cart Development

I was a lead developer of a web-based Employee & Manager Self Service Human Resources/Benefits/Payroll application. The application was installed on servers at every client location - non-hosted/ASP.

What we did to allow clients to customize there application while allowing for easy upgrade of the core software was allow the client to specify a "Customization Directory" on their webserver. The client would place *only* customized files in their customization directory, using the same directory structure as the original.

Everytime a file was needed our application would first use the file in the customization directory, if it existed - if it didn't exist in the customization directory, it would use the delivered file.

This allowed for easy identification and management of customized files while allowing for a smooth upgrade process. The downside - our application had an engine that every request to the web server passed through - X-Cart does not.

I do believe however, that we could use a combination of PHP and creative redirection to accomplish this without much work. Maybe this could be the future of "skin1" versus "skin1_original"?

Just A Thought (can you tell I just applied upgrades last night?)

--al ponte