(Mostly) Static Site

[brucelynch]

I'm looking to add zencart to an existing (relatively) static website and would like some configuration recommendations:

I have a website with about 40 static pages; these include product pages. Each product page has a buy button. My intention is to manually add zencart links to these product pages that will add a single item to the cart. (We almost never add products to our product line.)

What's the simplest way to accomplish this? I was thinking of just putting zencart in a subdirectory, this might work great I think, but my only prerequisite is I need to know if an item is in the cart so I can put a cart_has_item indicator on the homepage and other static pages.

[schoolboy]

Abandon the static site and convert to zencart.

Zencart is designed to be the COMPLETE site. It is not a "bolt-on" shopping cart.

[brucelynch]

That's not going to happen. I mean, we could integrate the existing site into ZenCart (and will if that's what we have to do), but that would be a lot of work I'd guess given the custom design of the existing site. Again, we have a products page. Individual products pages. And a single buy button on those pages that allows you to add one item to the cart.

I understand what you're saying, and we'd use a more "bolt on" ecommerce engine if that made sense for us, but we have to use zencart because our in-house fulfillment software has some custom code that currently only integrates with zencart.

So again, if I have to integrate directly into zencart, what is the best way to do that given I have a client with VERY SPECIFIC design parameters?

[schoolboy]

Well, if you have custom code of any variety that interfaces with zencart, then there is no way for any of us to advise of how best to perform "integration", because none of us will know what that code entails, nor what aspects of zencart it integrates with, nor what result it achieves.

You may as well be asking us to describe Jupiter's core.

As mentioned, zencart is designed (several hundred thousand lines of code) to perform a complete eCommerce function, and as many (most) of the functions are inter-dependant, carving them up (while possible) can be an immense task.

You do not give nearly enough info to describe how the current "buy now" function operates and nor do you provide sufficient depth of detail relating to what your current ZC integration is doing.

I doubt whether any valuable advice can be given unless/until we have this knowledge - and even then, it take scores of hours to "unpick" everything to come up with a rational and workable system.

Perhaps you should be contracting the services of a zencart expert, who would be able to perform the necessary audit and analysis, and then advise on a way forward.

In general, "slicing up" zencart to enable "bits" of it is far more complex and costly than simply converting an old-fashioned and possibly redundant HTML site, to a complete zencart set up.

There are a huge number of issues here - those relating to zencart's functional elements (such as the setting and tracking of session ID's), the inter-relational nature of the database, and a host of issues relating to SEO, content discovery, page generation, etc...

I hope you have deep pockets... If not, then a quick conversion to ZC (takes a couple of days) would still be the most practical option.

[gjh42]

Seeing your current site would let us advise on how difficult or easy it would be to convert it into Zen Cart.
It is possible to achieve essentially any layout and design with Zen Cart; some will be more work than others.
Custom functionality can always be added to Zen Cart, sometimes with free or commercial mods and sometimes by writing the code yourself or hiring it out.

[schoolboy]

Yes... if "site cosmetics" is your biggest concern, then there's some comfort in knowing that "cosmetic design" with zencart is relatively easy, compared with reshaping FUNCTIONAL operations.

And as Glen says, it is perhaps easier to code functions OUT of a fully functional zencart than it will ever be by slicing up the program.

[fairestcape]

Most clients are blissfully unaware of the challenging complexities in proper eCommerce code functions and spend most of their time agonising over "what shade of blue to put in the logo" .

As has been said, getting the cosmetics right (if the shade of blue isn't a massive issue) is quite easy. Fiddling with code is immensely more complex.

[brucelynch]

Thanks for all the responses. I'll try and be more clear.

Our custom code that integrates into zencart is irrelevant to any solution here. It simply exports a custom XML file of recent orders. But it's important enough to our in-house process to prohibit us from moving to a different, more suitable, ecommerce engine. Some day this will change, and we will be able to find a more suitable approach. This is one of primary reasons I'd like to make the integration as light as possible.

We have an existing design. It has forty products. We cannot alter the pages at all. They must be exact. (It's just a constraint.) And doing as little integration wth zencart is ideal.

We are doing some server migration, so we have an oppurtunity to untangle zencart a bit from our site. The way we previously integarted zencart feels unseccarily complex --- each page gets a a custom templateSystem with some variables in its own modules/page include.

We only use (and only will every use) zencart for the checkout system. So that's all we need to think about when integrating into our site.

So is there a a way to easily preserve session state on the "relatively static" site, by including a small piece of zencart code in the header, hardocde a link on product page that adds an item to the cart, and in the cart, just add a header that inlcudes links back to the "static" site?

I hope that's more helpful. Thanks for the feedback.

[gjh42]

Keeping your existing page design is feasible in Zen Cart (difficulty depending on the exact design), but if you think ZC is not suitable for running your webshop on and intend to migrate away from using any part of it, there is not much for us to discuss. Kuroi posted some code a while back for adding an item to the ZC shopping cart from an external site, so you could search for that. There has also been discussion in the forum about using the ZC session in an external page/site.

[brucelynch]

Thanks. I've decided, based on all your feedback, to simply install zencart in folder and not integrate our site into it, but rather use a minimalistic theme. This will keep the site relatively simple and will also open the client up to more features of zencart then they're currently using. So our current site will be at root, and the store will be a subfolder.

Questions:

(1) Is there a trivial way to add session control to the parent directory? So if our store is at domain.com/store, can the documents at domain.com have access to any data? (Reason: On these root pages we'd like to show a special indicator if you have an item in your cart.)

(2) Currently the client is also blogging at but is using wordpress to accomplish this. I'd rather not have to maintain zencart and wordpress. Does zencart have a simple blogging platform that can be customized? (I'm happy to continue to maintain wordpress if that's the best solution.)

Thanks!