News Box Manager — for Zen Cart v1.5.1 through v1.5.4

Version 2.1.0

Current Support Thread at Zen Cart Forums: News Box Manager v2.0.0 [Support Thread]

This plugin represents a restructuring of the News Box Manager, v1-5 for Zen Cart v1.3.x, enabling the plugin to support current Zen Cart and PHP versions.

Purpose

This plugin adds a Latest News side-box and home-page center-box with an admin-level news editor to your Zen Cart. You create news articles using the tool Localization->News Box Manager, which are displayed in the side- and center-boxes (based on your chosen configuration).

The news articles you write have a Start Date and End Date (which can be set to "--none--"), which determine whether or not the article is displayed to your customers. Articles are displayed if the article's status is Enabled, the Start Date is on or after the current date and the End Date is either "--none--" or on or before the current date. That way, you can write an article today that isn't displayed to your customers until sometime next week.

Admin Interfaces

Once you have copied the admin-level files to your cart's file system, you will see two new menu items:

  1. Configuration->News Box Manager, where you control the plugin's settings.
  2. Localization->News Box Manager, where you write and manage your store's news articles. If you have an HTML editor installed in your admin, you can use that editor to edit/create your news articles. If you have multiple languages in your store, you can write language-specific articles, too.

Customer Interfaces

On your store-side, once you have installed and enabled the plugin there are various new elements to be shown to your customers:

  1. The Latest News sidebox. Displays the titles of the most-recent news articles, if enabled by your admin's Tools->Layout Box Controller.
  2. The Latest News centerbox on your home page. Displays the release date and title of the most-recent news articles, if enabled by the setting in Configuration->News Box Manager.
  3. The News Archive page. Displays the full list of active news articles.
  4. The More News page. Displays the contents of a selected news article.

Installation

This plugin has no core-file overwrite, but one template-override file; you should always backup your cart's database and files prior to making any changes.

  1. Unzip the plugin's package file, which you've most likely already done if you're reading this!
  2. Rename the /YOUR_ADMIN directory to match your Zen Cart's secret admin-folder name.
  3. Rename the one template-override directory (/includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE) to match your cart's active template folder.
  4. If you've made previous changes to /includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/templates/tpl_index_default.php, you'll need to merge those changes with this plugin's updates (one marked section).
  5. Log into your Zen Cart's admin-console.
  6. Copy only the plugin's admin-level files to your store's file system.
    1. /YOUR_ADMIN/news_box_manager.php
    2. /YOUR_ADMIN/includes/auto_loaders/config.news_box_manager.php
    3. /YOUR_ADMIN/includes/extra_datafiles/news_box_manager_file_database_names.php
    4. /YOUR_ADMIN/includes/init_includes/init_news_box_manager_admin.php
    5. /YOUR_ADMIN/includes/languages/english/news_box_manager.php
    6. /YOUR_ADMIN/includes/languages/english/extra_definitions/news_box_manager_menu_name.php
    7. /YOUR_ADMIN/includes/languages/german/news_box_manager.php
    8. /YOUR_ADMIN/includes/languages/german/extra_definitions/news_box_manager_menu_name.php
  7. Click the "Admin Home" link in the admin header; that will cause this plugin's initialization script to run, creating the necessary database tables and configuration items.
  8. Copy the plugin's store-side files to your store's file system.
    1. /includes/extra_datafiles/news_box_manager_file_database_names.php
    2. /includes/languages/english/more_news.php
    3. /includes/languages/english/news_archive.php
    4. /includes/languages/english/extra_definitions/news_box_manager_defines.php
    5. /includes/languages/german/more_news.php
    6. /includes/languages/german/news_archive.php
    7. /includes/languages/german/extra_definitions/news_box_manager_defines.php
    8. /includes/modules/news_box_format.php
    9. /includes/modules/pages/more_news/header_php.php
    10. /includes/modules/pages/news_archive/header_php.php
    11. /includes/modules/sideboxes/news_box_sidebox.php
    12. /includes/templates/template_default/sideboxes/tpl_news_box_sidebox.php
    13. /includes/templates/template_default/templates/tpl_modules_news_box_format.php
    14. /includes/templates/template_default/templates/tpl_more_news_default.php
    15. /includes/templates/template_default/templates/tpl_news_archive.php
    16. /includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/css/stylesheet_news_box_manager.css
    17. /includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/templates/tpl_index_default.php
  9. Go to your admin's Configuration->News Box Manager to view and change any settings, then to to Localization->News Box Manager to start writing!

Un-Installing

To un-install this plugin, first remove all the new files introduced by this plugin and restore the template-override file. Then open the plugin's /uninstall_news_box_manager.sql, copy and paste the file's contents into your admin's Tools->Install SQL Patches and click "Send". That will remove all configuration settings and plugin-specific tables from your database.

Version History