Noob has a silly question?

Hey Zenners...

I have an existing site the I created using PHP to sell PDF's for business. I used PayPal Standard with IPN and SmartDDlite to accomplish it.

Now, the owner wants a shopping cart. I know ZC is the best, so I installed it, configured & recoded to get the right look/feel, yadda yadda...

Now, to make it work... Wha I'd LIKE to do, is to have the cart Look/Act like the following:

http://bosshandbooks.com/purchases.php

Note the tabs... this is all one page of code, not 4 files.

I currently have this:

http://bosshandbooks.com/zc/

Very similar. I want to keep the tabs, as it fits the overall paradigm we're using on the site. My question is how to get the products (whitepapers, MLP) to work into the existing code.

I'm fairly adept at PHP, but not fam. w/ZC

Any ideas?

p.s. these are digital delivery products....

BTW... ZC ver 1.3.9h

You could customize includes/languages/english/html_includes/define_main_page.php to display your products on the main page this way.

I should have mentioned that I actually already did that. I just don't know how to get products to display on the pages or have an "Add to Cart" button linking to the products on the page.

For this, look at

includes/templates/template_default/templates/tpl_product_info_display.php

I looked, but, being completely ignorant of ZC architecture, I don't really know what I'm looking at. How is this file used/called/etc? Can I use it to create a button that adds a product to the cart?

Your proposed design is a big departure from how Zen Cart works. So you have two choices:

a) Take it as it comes so that you have to click from the main page to the product info page; this was how the cart was designed, or,

b) Implement your design by rolling up your sleeves and figuring out how the page I referred you to works. If you can read and understand php, it shouldn't take too terribly long.

When you have dozens or hundreds of products - as most Zen Carts do - your design is impractical; that's why no one has done it before (AFAIK). It could be done, but it will take some effort.

Well, There's not likely to be more than about 20 products. Do I just do a require(includes/templates/template_default/templates/tpl_product_info_display.php );? in my page?

Color this one resolved. Many thanks!!!!

Good to hear:) So what was the solution to your situation?

I customized the tpl_product_info_display.php file and worked it into my existing site.