Need Help With Mod I'm Writing on one little piece I'm missing...

[Mega Moonshine]

By adding another parameter to the URL you raise the spectre of creating multiple Duplicate Content issues.

Good point, one I have not yet considered. My first thought to overcome the issue would be to POST vs GET any data pairs to keep it out of sight, off the address bar (so to speak), etc. Don't know if search engines ignore POST data or not...

How does your mod interact with canonicalisation modules to ensure that searchengines combine the rankings for all of the alternative URLs, rather than let them all compete against each other in the SERPs?

I am planning to use an SEO product that cleans all of that up and if necessary, to customize it to strip out potential duplicates.

You have brought up some good points and I will properly address them at the time it becomes an issue. For now, it is a much bigger problem not having a mod that can make Zen Cart work for me the way I want (need) it to...

I'd rather have a website that works and is easy to maintain than have the best SEO rankings... To a point, I will admit.

So, any suggestions on where to initially put the "Hook" into Zen Cart that I originally posted about?

[kuroi]

Links are built using the zen_href_link function. However, this is very core so you mess with it at your peril, and since any changes you make will be unique to your site, there's not a lot of support that anybody else will be able to give you if you create a problem by doing so.

That's the central place, your alternative would be looking for the places that that function is called in the areas in which you want to make the change.

Using POST rather than GET would probably be a ton of work as it would require changing every affected link simple links into a form, and since I suspect that many of the links you'd want to change would already in forms, restructuring whole pages to reduce the scope of those forms (where feasible), or changing how those forms work to accept multiple submits, which in turn opens up some frustrating cross-browser differences in how forms are processed.

[Mega Moonshine]

Kuroi, you mentioned several things that I suspected and you confirmed.

To mess with the zen_href_link function is as you say, perilous and would be very troublesome to many.

And if I did, I'm thinking that I would still have to go to each .php file that calls it to pass the parms I would want - and if I'm already in the file(s) that call the function, why don't I just make the changes there in the first place? Duh!

I was/am just looking for a way to touch/modify one file rather than many, but I don't think that will be an option. Looks like I will have to touch several - and to do it right to find all the ones needing to be touched up will require much trial and error...

Oh well. Thanks for your feedback and input.

Chris