Things every New Zenner needs to know

[worldmaker]

THANKS KUORI!
Worldmaker - yeah I have the book, but as most people will tell you, it doesn't include many of the other customizations that we need to make.

Very true, that's why I made notes of my own from the very beginning.

[presley32]

Hi, Did the guide ever get finished and if so where can I get it.
As I am completely new to Zen and could do with some serious help with understanding the files.

eg: uploading different software and which files to put them in as I have been trying to install Easy Populate and find I am having serious problems. And yes I have read the INSTALL page over & over and cannot really make much sense of it.

Please remember that some of us have never done anything like this before and do need a lot of help.

I tried to get help from my host and am told:

"You get free support when hosting with me but naturally I am not going to start telling people how to do my job or I will not have one."

All this after getting told ""I do give support for zen cart too. I also like to teach my clients how to use it and do things themselves.""

So will probably be changing hosting in the near future.
Regards Andrew

[TShooters]

This thread was originally started to gather suggestiions on basically what the title of it says. Articles on those suggestions can be found here in the FAQS/Tutorials:

https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/i...hp?category=16

Which Easy Populate version are you trying to use, and what
specifically in the readme.txt/install.txt is confusing to you?

[TShooters]

Also, Andrew, it's very helpful to have an unzipped copy of the
Zen Cart version you're using (1.3.8a hopefully!) on your hard drive so you can acquaint yourself with ZC's file structure.

[presley32]

Thanks for your replys did work it out with a little help from the forum and Tutorials/FAQ and I have learnt a lot reading all the posts.

Thanks to everyone who has helped me
Andrew

[DougBittinger]

I've been using ZenCart for about 3 years, but consider myself a newbie because I have yet to develop more than a very rudimentary undertsanding of your system. Back in the days of DOS and dinosaurs I wrote computer programs, published a text of structured programming when spaghetti code was the norm, I still do a lot of HTML coding. So I'm not a complete knotthead, but making modifications to this thing is mostly beyond me. The major impediments to learing are:

Zencart itself explains so little. In a list of things to be configured you display a list of titles, if edited, it repeats the title and tells you to set a value. The new version, admittedly, is better about showing what values are acceptable, but if don't know what the title means, you don't know what it does. Attributes are somtheing I use a great deal and have gotten pretty good at the basic stuff, but I still don't know what Price Factor: Offset: means or how it can be used. I'm priobably missing something wonderful here, but can't find an explanation.

Finding explanations is a real chore. Searching for something using the title of the item rarely yields useful information. Generally I get a list of scores of pages of discussions about the general topic, ie if I search for Price Factor it will hand me every thread available on attributes and I have to spend a week an a half of spare time trying to read them all looking for that one message that explains Price Factor as an aside while answering a question entitled How Do I Display Color Swatches for Attributes?

I am currently searching for reasons that the Price Discount function is ignoring the Minimum Qty and discounting all sales for a new install I'm trying to build. Searching for Price Disount lands me back in the haystack of attribute discussions. But I dare not post a question until I've read every last post in every forum or some gnarly ZenDev will snarl at me "We've already answered that, do a search" If SEARCH worked, I wouldn't be bothering you!!

Keep in mind now, that I'm still searching for answers because I reccommend ZenCart to anyone asking me about shopping cart software. Especially if they need customization. So I'm not dissing you, just answering your question.

Other areas:

Templates: I always have to hire someone to make a template to match teh rest of the store and install it - taht's all black magic to me.

Stylesheet - I have a terrible time trying to change font sizes and colors without blowing up teh entire web site (and having to hire a ZenMaster to fix it)

Road Map: The Zen Cart script is such a labyrinthic maze with multiple duplications of files, that it is very difficult to figure out which gets edited, even if you can find where it is. I understand that its power and flexibility require this complexity, but the claim that ZenCart id extremely user friendly only applys if yuo are a programmer familair with the guts of this thing.

Well, everything else I could say has already been said at least once. I second what they said. What it boils down to is that programmers write for programmers, not for people. You folks have your own language, maybe even your own society, you understand what you're doing just fine, but we don't. We need to be able to ferret out answers.

Which is what I'm SUPPOSED to be doing right now. So I'd better get back to my reading or I'll be a grey-headed old man before I fint that one line of text that offers the holy grail of an answer.

[rstevenson]

Many people find that searching the forum is more productive if you do it from Google -- crazy sounding it is, but work it does.

In a Google search bar (or on Google of course) enter "zen-cart: [your search term goes here] "

So searching for "zen-cart: price factor offset explanation" (you can ignore capitals and punctuation) gives a list of hits, of course, and the answer you need is number one on page one.

Rob

[colin4255]

That goes for me too. Been designing sites for a while now, but am fairly new to CSS in the sense that when I design it my self, I always always fully comment it, ie

//The next bit changes the colour of text on the third box from the top on left hand side// etc etc.

I have got around this using firefox and the web developer plug in so I can then see which bits of css are affecting which bits of which page, but boy oh boy would it have sped up the process to have a fully commented stylesheet in the first place. Greedy I know for a free product but a lot of people with no idea how to find out even the basics are just getting stumped by this.

We all want to be able to easily figure out how to change the colours, the colour of the text, the top and bottom images, and the various messages with ease. One day when I'm old, I'll have to learn how to do all this proplery!

I know not very much but if I can help in any way I will!

[stonecraft1]

I wish that I had never got zen cart, it is so hard for me to use, all i want to do is change my fort colors, i know it is in css, but i don't know how to access it, I bought the book and still can't figture it out, i don't think I'm the only one that feels that way.

I don't know how to access html either form my favorite text editor. I don't have a favorite text editor, I don't even know where to find it.
and they are not telling you where to find it, because your already supposed to know all of that stuff. If you can tell me how to change the font colors, it would be so great!

Thanks
Dave at stonecraft1

[misty]

all i want to do is change my fort colors, i know it is in css, but i don't know how to access it, I bought the book and still can't figture it out, i don't think I'm the only one that feels that way.

I don't know how to access html either form my favorite text editor. I don't have a favorite text editor, I don't even know where to find it.
and they are not telling you where to find it, because your already supposed to know all of that stuff. If you can tell me how to change the font colors, it would be so great!

Download and install Firefox..then add Web Developers Tool Kit...
edit text .. use notepad...