ZenCart

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computing: software: web applications: ZenCart

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Overview

ZenCart is a free, open-source application for running an online store. It is a fork of osCommerce.

Reference

• home page
• Wikipedia

Related Pages

• interfacing QuickBooks and ZenCart
• ZenCart how-to for store owners
• importing data into ZenCart

Differences from osCommerce

• Plusses
  • Runs with or without register globals on
  • More friendly managing of admin security
  • Supports multiple admin users, with different privilege levels

Notes

• When told to create the configure.php files and make them writeable, do not bother editing them; the web-based install overwrites what is in the file.
• The "ZenCart" and "Sashbox" banners which appear down the sides and at the bottom can be turned off in the "banner manager" tool. Also, inside the "Layout Boxes Controller" tool are modules named "banner_box.php", "banner_box_all.php", and "banner_box2.php"; these probably/maybe have something to do with how/where banners are displayed (when there are any to display).
• In the admin section, the username is case-sensitive. (Passwords are usually case-sensitive, but not usernames.)
• ZenCart seems to have been designed with the assumption that the user would never need to import data from another system. There is no "bulk import" (e.g. using CSV files) facility, and writing one is hampered by the lack of any way to assign arbitrary keys to products or manufacturers (i.e. the data schema has no fields for this). One is left with the choice between a kluge (e.g. using meta tags tables to store the relevant data) or creating a new table for cross-referencing.

Modifying the Admin area

• admin contains the files which implement the menu actions (i.e. when you click on a menu entry)
• admin/includes/boxes contains the definitions of the menus and their drop-downs
• somewhere there is a file which includes all the various files in each of these folders; to add a new custom menu, you need to edit this file and then create files in the above directories
• includes/database_tables.php contains defines for all the database's table names
  • You have to modify admin/includes/header_navigation.php to affect what actually shows up in the menubar

Other settings

• HTML title of store (i.e. the name of the page as displayed in the browser window title bar)
  • There may be some better place to set this, but the only place I could find for setting this is the constants TITLE and SITE_TAGLINE in:

    includes/languages/english/meta_tags.php

• The appearance of the top of the page is defined in includes/languages/english/header.php