How best to use Zen Cart for multiple domains, X, Y, and Z?

[riverlife]

Greetings, Zensters, and thank you for your time.

I'm using v.1.3.8.

I've spent about 60 or so hours over the past week immersing myself in Zen Cart, and have come to really admire the PHP approach to web-design: sort of the Leibnizian approach to the Newtonian HTML paradigm with which I'm much more familiar. I pray you forgive how little I have advanced after so much time spent.

Anyway, after brute hacking PHP files, modifying CSS, and staring down resultant HTML code, and then googling this and other forums/resources, I'm still not exactly sure about several of Zen Cart's capabilities, nor if Z C has them, how best (or even how to) implement them. To wit:

X. My conflustered client has four domains he wishes to run through one Z C. He basically breaks his inventory into categories, each category gets its own domain.

What he wishes me to do in my own conflusteration is to get the main page to be his catchall domain which links to all the others. Then, he wants, say, page 2 to be the clothing domain and its cart, page 3 to be kitchenware and its cart, etc. Will one Z C handle multiple domains coming into multiple pages?

IF so, do I add /customtemplate/domain2 /cumstomtemplate/domain3 etc. for each page that will host another store (clothing, kitchenware, etc.) linked to from the main page (Shop of shops).

Y. Will Z C handle this in one database? If not, and this I've really looked for and found conflicting answers to, where exactly does one put each new database, and what must one do or not do to the database before it can be usable?

Z. Having very grossly modified the way the PHP prepares the main page, and having added more than a few CSS styles, how will these changes to tpLheader.php, tpl_footer.php, and
tpl_mainpage.php affect subsequent pages, i.e. domain2, domain3, etc.?

To be more clear on that last point, what is the best way to customize the mainpage and not have it affect other pages? CSS only?

Again, thank you for your time, and for helping me to unFrankenstein this poor poor store.

Patrick

[kobra]

Only way to use a single database to run multiple shops is to use the 3rd party Multi-Site module
A bit confusing but many have it working

[riverlife]

Thank you Kobra for a quick and short on-the-money response!

It may be a bit confusing, but after all I've gone through and learned with Zen Cart, what's a little more education?

I'm assuming (ya know what that means!) that this mod will help me with what pages to put what domains/shops on (they're all on the same server).

On point Z in my first post, I've decided to go back with original versions of the php files and just use CSS display:none tags to keep various things from appearing, instead of possibly hobbling the code altogether.

Again, thank you! I feel several hundred pounds lighter already.