Hi,

I need some advice about what best practices work when extending Smith Cart's functionality. For example, right now you can only associate only one link with a product. It might be a link to a downloadable product manual pdf. But you can only have one. Suppose we want to associate multiple links to this product because the product has multiple manuals. The current functionality doesn't support that.

If I want to extend that functionality to support multiple links, I will have to create a database table to hold the additional links and write some custom code to manage the table and provide an admin the ability to associate multiple links to a product.

Now if I add this code to the Smith Cart modules, my site will work fine until Smith Cart releases a new version and then I have to make everything work with the new version. This could potentially be a lot of rework every time there's a new release.

If I create new modules that inherit from the Smith Cart modules, I may be able to separate the functionality enough to maintain the code as Smith Cart releases new versions.

Is this what other developers are doing? What is Smith Cart's recommendation for extending their functionality while keeping the codebase ready for future upgrades of the official product?

Any insight would be very helpful. Thank you very much.

Rahim