How does it work?

[Bridy]

Can someone explain to me how exactly Zen Cart works. I am a bit confussed.

Can I upload the cart by itself onto my server or do I have to put coding into my HTML builder before i upload my website?

I am using Site Studio, and for the life of me I can not figure out how to add HTML before I upload it to my server.
So I upload my site and then manualy add my Pay Pal shopping cart to every single page!

This is time consuming and the more product we get the longer it is going to take me.

I am hoping to have this porblem solved.

Can you do actual site building with Zen Cart as well?
Should I scrap the whole Site Studio and start fresh?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
this is our website now
www.clothdiapermom.com

[gjh42]

Zen Cart is not something you add onto your site. It *is* your site.

You don't use anything like Site Studio to edit it; products and categories are added in the ZC admin panel, and the content of some pages is edited in admin > Tools > Developers Toolkit.

Other things are done by editing PHP files and the stylesheet in a file/text editor like Notepad++ and uploading to your site with an FTP program like Filezilla.

There is a template override system that lets you create a custom template {starting from one of the existing ones) and switch between templates. Look at (sorry, site offline) for a selection of free templates available. Any of these can be downloaded and installed, and then modified by you.

Read the FAQs for an overview of how things are done.

[Absolute]

Zen is a server-side application. You can uplaod it to any server running PHP, and then follow the self-installation process. You can really do as much or as little as need. Firstly, you login to the admin, and add products. Then you need to select a method of shipping and a method of payment.

Then your store is bacisally ready to take money.

There is a list of features in the wiki

You may need templating to customise your store, but one tempalte can be applied to every page, so you don't have to hand craft the html for all the pages.

Welcome aboard!

Absolute

[Bridy]

oh man, this all sounds so confussing! lol

I wish I knew about this before I bought Site Studio, could have saved myself some money.

I will have to play around with the Zencart to see what I can come up with.

[afo]

Bridy, take a deep breath. You'll be confused for a while, but once you get going, you'll be very glad you went with Zen Cart.

If you look at the Holzheimer's site in my sig, you'll see what I mean. I maintain the website for the owner. I took her from a site that required the buyer to send in the order with payment to an HTML site with a PayPal button "add to cart" for every item. It was an improvement, but with so many items (and growing), it was so time consuming I knew I had to find a better way.

You should be able to come close to your current design (if not actually duplicate it) with Zen Cart. We're here to help when you need it.

[Bridy]

thank you thank thank you!
the support here is amazing!

I e-mail site studio for help and all they do is cut and paste the answers from their help files. If I knew how to do it from the help file I wouldn't be asking!! lol

Okay, so Site Studio at this point is useless? I just need to get past that and I can move on.
I was hoping it would be easy, and it is very easy but not suited for an e-commerce website.

I think this might have been answered for me. But Zen cart is automatic? will it subtract products from my shopping cart as they are bought?

Thank you!!

[Bridy]

so what does this mean??

I just messaged my webserver and they asked me for my domain so they can see what version of php I will get.

sounds a little fishy to me, lol

[gjh42]

Yes it will. It can keep track of inventory if you want it to. See the features list on the support site home page... or better yet, get started and download & install Zen Cart in a subfolder as noted above. Install the demo products when prompted by the installer, because they will give you a ton of information about exactly how things work.
Then you can play around and see for yourself. Just play for a while to become familiar with the cart before trying to load many products etc.


The current domain probably won't help them because it is not showing a Zen Cart. You can just tell them that you will need PHP5, as that is the current standard that the newest Zen Cart versions, and future ones, will work with.

[Bridy]

I was told I would get 4.4.2 verson

what does this mean? can anyone explain.

Thank you!

[gjh42]

The current version of Zen Cart will work on PHP 4.4.2, but future ones won't, and all servers are going to need to switch to PHP 5 soon. PHP is going to discontinue support for version 4.