The addons system in Interspire Shopping Cart has felt to me like it's been a bit underused so I've started making some simple addons that will hopefully help customers try and diagnose any problems they are having (and fix them) on the spot.

The first one I created was just a basic permissions checker so that you can make sure that all the things that need write access have it. Our installer and upgrade wizard check this as well but this addon will be useful if you move your site to another site, when you go live for example, to make sure everything is going to work ok.

The next addon I'm planning on writing is one that will check the hash of all the files in shopping cart to make sure that the file that is there is the one that is meant to be there. The most obvious use of this is to make sure that after you do an upgrade that you have uploaded all the files. This won't be able to account for changes to files that have been made intentionally but at least it will give customers a quick way to check what files are modified.

These two (assuming I finish the second one in time otherwise it will only be one) will be included for free with the next release of Interspire Shopping Cart.

Those are the two most obvious ideas to me for little addons that can quickly check parts of the store. I've got 1 more idea for an addon but that is a more ambitious project that I'm going to keep under my hat until I've had some time to test it out.

I'd be interested to see if anyone else has any other ideas for addons like this so if you have an idea that I might be able to quickly turn into an addon (I'm mainly thinking of ones that can check parts of your store to make sure everything is ok but all ideas are welcome) then please reply to this blog post.