From the Beginning.

[brizie]

It has been well over a year since I last looked at Zencart (I have 1 customer with a live shop)
I now have another customer who I have shown zencart to and would like to setup a live shop for them.

So here is what I have done so far:-
read forums,read faqs,read wiki.

I made a new folder in /includes/templates.

I copied over template_info.php and made appropriate changes.
I made new folder inside my template called images
I copied my logo.gif into this folder.

I changed my template in admin section to my new custom template.
All i expected to change was the logo, what I got was pink left panels , purple right panels and a brown bar along centre panel top.

So er ....HELP!!!!!

[kuroi]

What you did was turn off the Classic Template that was on by default and instead create a template that is based on the template_default settings. These are deliberately garish to encourage you to create your own template by creating your own stylesheet and changing colors etc. there. Your own stylesheet woould override the effects that you are seeing.

[brizie]

Thank you kuroi
I have now used your template
I noticed a number of contributions are no longer free or in use.
Can anyone recommend a few good modules/contributions worth adding to the standard install?

[kuroi]

Ahh. The desire to start accessorizing a new Zen Cart.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of mods and have personally written or updated about half a dozen including a couple of pretty hefty ones (see below). However, whenever there's a Zen Cart upgrade there is a sudden flurry of activity as Zen Cart devotees eagerly enquire as to whether this or that mod works with the new version, followed shortly afterwards by a wailing sound from less savvy users who have tried to install mods not written for the version they are working with. Basically, the more mods you install, the more challenging keeping up with Zen Cart releases will become.

Consequently I only install an additional mod when it solves a specific problem or design requirement that one of my clients has. Probably the only mod that I would universally recommend (and even then not necessarily for sites hosted on Windows servers) is Backup MySQL, since everybody should do backups. Second would be Image Handler as virtually every site needs images. After that it depends on the needs of the site that you are building.