Trying to use an image background on .leftBoxHeading to no avail

Ahhh, so you've already thought about it :-)

Well, if you took the existing book, you could strip it down to the core and then build on the core elements. There's so much about Zen Cart that's being kept in the dark and it's so difficult to find the light!

I was looking at some of the featured Zen sites and I see one particular designer (http://www.########-lingerie-boutique.co.uk/babydolls) has Zen well and truly sussed.

Everything on this site is well aligned, well proportioned, colour co-ordinated; to a tee.

Some of the templates on Allogo are pretty tempting too though don't you agree? I mean, how do they do those CSS drop down menus for the shopping cart and things like that :-)

What the existing book does, it does well. There would be no point in trying to improve on that. As Rob says, a whole new book needs to be created for design development - it would not really cover any of the existing territory.
And it's not that things are being kept in the dark; everything is there to see and a lot is described in the wiki and forums, but nobody has yet pulled together a book explaining the design/customization process well.

That's exactly my point, I'm not arguing, I'm agreeing :)

There is a wealth of information out there on the detailed designs featured in Zen. It's going to take someone like you, who has been around this for some time, to pool it all together into an easy to read, well structured format.

Good luck with it, I don't envy you the task but I think it would reap the rewards.

The site you reference has a very pretty header and good images, but everything else about the design is essentially plain vanilla stock Zen Cart with colors changed, except that they took a coding step backward and used a bunch of layout tables that ZC got rid of a few years ago.

Maybe I'm not finding very good examples of Zen Cart templates then?

I particularly do like the ones on algozone like this one for example. Not really looking to pay $150 for it but I love the way the navigation buttons along the top work. How do they do that?!?

I also love the shopping cart hover feature, how on earth do you work such magic with Zen Cart??

In that particular instance they've put each button into a table cell (not necessary, but it's what they know how to do I guess) and then they use the browser events onmouseover and onmouseout to trigger a different classname for the cell. Like this...

In the stylesheet they define each of those classes with, among other things, a different GIF image for each.

All of this works because they've provided a javascript which is handling the events and redrawing the affected elements. In fact, this template comes with 7 different js files.

If you're interested in a similar effect, I've seen threads here in the forum about tabbed menus of various sorts. Or look in the Free Software Add Ons, searching for "CSS Horizontal" for a couple of ways to do it.

Rob

Hi,

Just read your reply there but you may have noticed I've gone for one of the free mods (css_flyout_1.5) and tweaked it slightly to match the site. Looks good but has a really cool advanced search feature too.

Only thing that bothers me about it is that I can't set a delay or time lag on the flyout so even just passing it with the mouse sets the menus flying with a 0ms delay :-)

Oh well, it was free lol

Yes, I find that flicker as you move the sursor over the menu is visually annoying, but it's happening on more and more sites. A few ms delay would be a good thing, but then some people with fast mouse hands won't know ... ... Well, as you probably know, it's never possible to please everyone. :P

A couple of minor suggestions for that menu:

• can you make the drop-down the same width as the menu title?
• can you add a little transparency to the drop-downs? Not enough to make them hard to read, but just enough to show the outline of what's below them. If each button of the menus is an image, perhaps use a PNG image with transparency.

Rob