Integrate Zen into Joomla

[faulkns]

I am currenty building a CMS website and store for which I am using Joomla and Zen Cart.

I know I can put my store in a wrapper menu entry on Joomla, but it doesn't look very good and I don't want to use any Joomla store, because I love the feel of Zen Cart.

Is there any way of integrating Zen Cart into Joomla properly as I want the Joomla to be my home page?

Help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[kobra]

I want the Joomla to be my home page

Can you explain what it is that you want in this home page that requires the overhead of joomla.

While not specifically a content manager, Zen Cart does have some facility for the management of content via ez-pages, you can have straight pages, a TOC page linked to ?? pages etc.

To use joomla and keep the appearance seamless, you will have to match the template styles any way and unless there is a very good reason for this, it is mostly counterproductive and only additional work for little gain.

You can have one look for the Zen cart main page, say no side boxes, and then in the shopping area, sides boxes on one or both sides or none by moving navigation to the top nav bar, or??

[faulkns]

Hi Kobra

The Joomla site was destined to be main site to attract and eventually drive traffic to shop to generate revenue. I am looking to have news, works in progress (Its a model painting thing) (Blog style), Ebay feature section, articles, forum, etc. I am not sure if Zen could handle the amount of content I will hopefully be generating.

[faulkns]

Originally Posted by faulkns

Hi Kobra

The Joomla site was destined to be main site to attract and eventually drive traffic to shop to generate revenue. I am looking to have news, works in progress (Its a model painting thing) (Blog style), Ebay feature section, articles, forum, etc. I am not sure if Zen could handle the amount of content I will hopefully be generating.

Also as I will be using Ebay to help generate traffic, I will not be able to link directly to a shop site without breaching their rules

Stewart

[kobra]

OK I see the reasoning, as EBAY rules are strict. Rather than trying to run ZenCart as a component of joomla, you might look at linking to your ZenCart shop and providing varying "home" & "main home" back links in Zen Cart. The other way can be done but I have not approached it from your direction but from using the 'framework' as a base for ZenCart and this is not simple.

Trying to get the two vastly different style engines to operate in unison with one another is a major task.

See what you think of running it as a link...

[faulkns]

Thanks. I thought the linking URL would probably be the only way.

Never mind. At least it's clean and simple

Stewart

[spottedhaggis]

I am doing something slightly similar.

I have a zencart shop I have done, its quite popular, and the buyers all create things out of the items purchased and have requested that the shop owner have a gallery they can post to, discussion forum, etc etc, so I am building a Joomla site that will be linked from the main shop.

What I would like to do is be able to specify content to be displayed inside Joomla, say random products etc in various places, the simple idea to get sales from users of the forum pages (since guests are also allowed)

I have read something about a module that might work, but cannot find it, so wonder if Zen are perhaps working on something that can achieve this type of link, and even better would be a mod to allow users registered within Zencart to also be registered inside Joomla?

[barco57]

you might want to take a look at http://www.plastiquemonkey.com/ it is a combo of wordpress, singapore and zencart. The look was handled so well between the different parts (cms, gallery and cart) its sometimes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

[p m]

hey, thanks for the link. i designed the plastique monkey site.

it's a wordpress blog in the root domain, with singapore gallery installed to /gallery/ and zencart installed to /shop/. i fussed around with the CSS until they looked mostly similar and added a tab menu stolen from the mistylook wordpress theme to tie them all together.

unfortunately for what you're trying to do, there's no real integration between the three sub-sites, just a lot of links (see this item on my blog, etc). i tried to use the external sidebox contribution to embed the "new in shop" zen sidebox in the wordpress sidebar, but the PHP involved was over my head. so i used an image rotator that i found on alistapart ("better image rotator", it's called) instead.

the shop is the only part of http://plastiquemonkey.com where people need to register. so i don't know how you'd keep people registered when moving from zen to zoomla, sorry...

[barco57]

your welcome. You did an outstanding job and I thought it might give some ideas. The fact that the different web apps aren't actually integrated is glossed over by the way you put it all together as a big package that "feels" like one entity. Once again good job.