Trying to incorporate shtml webpages

[Abby]

Hi

I'm slowly but surely bringing a website into zen-cart (2500 pages so far). I've used a combination of ezpages and define pages and it's worked fine for the normal static html pages.

I'll soon have to deal with shtml pages but cant figure out how to do it. I need to be able to update these pages (roughly 2,000 of them with hardcoded "buy now" buttons) so I dont think its practical to convert them to html pages.

Can someone tell me if its possible? or should i leave them as shtml pages and link them into zencart?

Thanks

[schoolboy]

Hi

I'm slowly but surely bringing a website into zen-cart (2500 pages so far). I've used a combination of ezpages and define pages and it's worked fine for the normal static html pages.

I'll soon have to deal with shtml pages but cant figure out how to do it. I need to be able to update these pages (roughly 2,000 of them with hardcoded "buy now" buttons) so I dont think its practical to convert them to html pages.

Can someone tell me if its possible? or should i leave them as shtml pages and link them into zencart?

Thanks

What type of information is contained in these static pages.

[Abby]

All the pages are basically information articles. The shtml pages use Server Side Includes to insert a html table that has a picture of a development part mention in the article with the option to order/ preorder the part.

Because its all about development product, the actual articles and html tables are frequently changed/updated.

[Abby]

I was looking at my old webpages and it dawned on me that what I'm looking for is very similar to the way zen-cart lists product when you look at a category. Can someone tell me what i need to change so that up to 5 specific products could be hardcoded to be listed. i think the file controling this listing is found at /includes/modules/CUSTOM_TEMPLATE/product_listing.php

From reading the forum i think i will be able to add the code to define pages and get the products to show on the individual pages?

[gjh42]

Why would you not want to use (perhaps with layout modifications) the Zen Cart product info or product listing page for your product articles? You could dump the text into the product description, and use the product image for your picture. If you want HTML formatting for the text, it is easy to enable it for the listing page.

[Abby]

Brilliant
Thanks for that suggestion. It never occurred to me to use the normal zen-products for articles that have only one product associated with them. This has reduced my outstanding workload by about 50%

Can you think of anything that i could do with the articles that have 2 or more products associated with them?

[gjh42]

Perhaps you could make those articles into categories, with products in them?

[Abby]

Yeah I thought of that but the number of categories makes the site really slow. I guess I'll just have to live with some pages remaining external to zen-cart with just a buy now button hard coded into them unless (until?) I get a brainwave!

Thanks

[gjh42]

The quantity of categories by itself shouldn't affect the site that much - there are sites with thousands of categories and subcats. How you display them might be an issue. If you have the categories sidebox with the stock "count" of products per category, that can slow things down. Turn off the counts in admin > Configuration > Layout Settings. It might work to organize the "product" and "category" articles under a few major top categories so everything is not trying to display at once.