Great post, dbltoe!

To work with Zen Cart, you have to pretty much forget about most skills you already have. Get yourself a good text editor (like Notepad++ or Crimson Editor) and an FTP client. Unzip a copy of Zen Cart on your local computer so you can see the folder/file structure. You can make all your changes locally and FTP them to your site. It's easy and it creates an instant backup of your site. The rest is a matter of reading the forum, Tutorials/FAQ and Wiki. Asking questions on the forum will likely help clarify issues, but Zen Cart is too complicated to start explaining here. You really need to do some of the work for yourself.