beginner text edit question

[mc12345678]

OK, I downloaded & unzipped Zencart, uploaded (through Cyberduck) the index.php to replace home/pinewood/public_html/zencart/index.php
and when I look at index.php now in cPanel it is full of code. However, when I go to control panel and open 'online catalog'
http://pinewoodforge.com/zencart/index.php?main_page=
It now has no content & no code. The plot thickens!
thanks too for the education about different files with the same name, it do be confusing to a newby.

Have you tried without the ?main_page= part?

Just gone to your website, like http://pinewoodforge.com/zencart/ it is rare to see someone trying to go to an address like you posted with the main_page being blank.

Certainly got an error 500 when trying, so you're going to have to look through your error logs to identify what has gone wrong. My guess is that something else has been changed by playing around with the various files. As stevesh suggested, you want to settle in with what you are going to use to transfer files, and try to become familiar with what you have before making broad changes. Now that you are working towards having a store in a subdirectory, perhaps it or another sub-directory can become you're play with store, where changes made won't affect your live stable store.