Why I'm Quitting Zen Cart

[pricediscrimination]

Zen Cart assumes it needs the extra billing and shipping information because eventually you'll need to ship something, so may as well get it at account setup than as at any other time. If you're not shipping then you can customise to reduce the stuff asked. You can also stop some fields via config settings. I recently turned of asking for the salutation and age.

This is a reasonable assumption, but a bit antiquated in terms of account creation expectations of today. Been trying to customize this with the help of other zenners and getting nowhere thanks to the unclear hacking away that needs to be done to code in several files, instead of a nicely designed on/off switch in the back-end.

I agree that the default themes are very dated. Plus most of the new responsive themes I've looked at so far are pretty clunky and some really slow sites up. However, I've recently seen some Zen Cart sites that look 'modern' and are responsive. But money was spent to buy them and customise them.

This, I'm realizing today, after my initial posting out of frustration, is what I think it all comes down to. Even the so-called premium pay-for themes just simply do not work. They always try to incorporate the same junky distractions like hover over an image and it zooms and tilts, instead of just creating a cleanly coded theme that works. IMo this is due to codebase of zencart, that didn't evolve very well with the idea of people creating themes and plugins. Developing a wordpress theme/plugin is a million times easier.

I often found having almost everything on the same page in WordPress frustrating. Sometimes you just want to do what you need to do and you don't need all of that extra clutter.

Off topic but at the top of your wordpress admin you have the option to shut off anything that you feel clutters the screen while posting.

Actually, it works quite well if you focus on the content and not on killer latest tricks. Sure it takes some work to find the extra plugins to get the right structured metadata into Zen cart, but it's easily done.

Being on top of the "latest tricks" is actually important for SEO. Clean URLs is also important but not an easy built-in solution.

I wish you luck in finding that one platform, because I haven't seen anything that comes close yet. Nothing is impossible to achieve in Zen Cart. Because it's open source, you can do anything. And often the extras are available, they just cost you money. But that happens with other platforms as well. But with closed platforms, you don't have the choice of breaking out and doing your own thing the way you can with Zen Cart.

That's a great point. But for aesthetics and ease of creating a better looking site, maybe a paid option will be better. IE: shopify type of service. Those sites look nice and seems like less hacking to do to achieve it.



Thank you very much for you thoughtful replies. It helps!