Turning an old site into a zencart store

Hi,

In the short time i've been using ZenCart this forum has proved infinitely helpful, but i have hit a hurdle.

I run a small Graphic Art & Music Design business, PHP/SQL are all alien to me but i am slowly picking little things up. I have a backup of an old website i want to turn into a ZenCart store but i don't even know where to begin! I know it can be done as i've seen some highly customised sites that look brilliant.

the backup of my old site is at: studio.paroxysm

I don't necessarily want to sacrifice the dimensions, style or layout of this backup, i'm pretty happy with it, what i would like to do is get the site as a frontend for the ZenCart system.

Any suggestions on where to start would be greatly appreciated.

cheers in advance. :D

So no one who's viewed this has any tips?

Essentially i just want to know where the dirs are, and which files control the following:

• what page/php file controls the dimensions of the default layout table?
• what directory do i look in to customise the side boxes?
• where do i find the header/footer/main content files?
• where do i find the search box to customise it?

I know how to do the basic mods and admin changes but i'm stuck with these few points and don't really know where to get started. I want to customise the HTML/PHP not just change the layout in the Admin.

Regardless of this though i'm going to install Zen Cart and have a crack at it.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

cheers

:lamo:

One of the major differences between Zen Cart and your other site is that Zen Cart has separated the css code out of the files to various stylesheets.

Since you're starting out, take a look in the tutorials for custom directory or overrides and play with the new template instead of the classic or template_default.

The following may interest you:-

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showpost.php?p=806640&postcount=4

Thanks for your info, i'll have to research this more thoroughly. I've just purchased a copy of a Zen Cart book from Dymocks online Australia, as i can't get the Manual advertised on this site from an Australian store.

The CSS embedded in the old site is only there because thats the singular page i retained of the whole site, i did initially have it linked to a seperate *.css file which no longer exists but wanted to make it look a little neater so i could picture myself what i wanted to achieve overall.

I appreciate the three seperate examples of different templates, and have looked over the tutorial/FAQ section, which seems to contain a lot of the answers i seek.

cheers for taking the time to respond.

[QUOTE=anaesthesiac;806704]Thanks for your info, i'll have to research this more thoroughly. I've just purchased a copy of a Zen Cart book from Dymocks online Australia, as i can't get the Manual advertised on this site from an Australian store.

[QUOTE]

The books are not "published" in a conventional way. You order it, it is printed (one copy at a time) in Spain - then it is shipped to you.

Depending on what your goal is to use a shopping cart system as your new format, your old theme can be used for the Zen Cart.

A little cut and pasting and some Photoshop/Illustrator work and choosing the right template to start with and voila.

Take a gander at all the free templates in the contribution sections. There are so many cool tweaks (modules) for this cart, it is mind boggling.

Yup there is a module for that.:laugh:

Perhaps this will interest you:

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showpost.php?p=806640&postcount=4

This is awesome, i was under the impression this would be a huge job changing everything around but after about 4hrs last night reading through FAQ's and slowly editing i've gotten to this point with the site switch over: http://www.studioparoxysm.com/home/.

It's by no means done, and the links don't work as of yet but it's getting there, i'm absolutely stoked!

cheers for the suggestions and help.

:clap:

I have a further question, i'm getting there slowly regarding the layout but i'm encountering one hurdle i can't get over. On my site i want the sideboxes to be contained in a table that is 3 cols by 3 rows with the main data contained in the middle col/row. The outer cols/rows contain images making up a bordered table. My problem is that i don't know how to get this to work!

I've made the table data in HTML and have created the images, but the problem seems to be as soon as i try and insert PHP data into the HTML it goes haywire.

An example can be seen here..

The first 4 sideboxes work fine, purely because they're all HTML. The ones underneath with the plain square layout are the ones i want to change but can't! I've spent a day and a half trying to fix this to no avail so any help will be appreciated.

cheers

:censored: