Linking To Product Description Pages

Like other shopping carts, Zen Cart provides a system for product images to be displayed on a page that are clickable links to their individually dedicated product description page. What I'm hoping to do is to circumvent that system, by placing product images in tables, where they are likewise clickable links to their individually dedicated product description page as provided by Zen Cart in its admin utility.

If this is possible, I need the ability to enter the products in Categories / Products in admin as usual, yet prevent the images from displaying on the general products listing page and then somehow place my html table with product images, where Zen Cart would normally display the product image listing, with each image in the table, linked to the Zen Cart provided product description pages, complete with images as usual.

As is often the case, "There's a mod for that."

Check out the Free Software Add Ons, link top-left of this forum. I used a mod called Single Listing Template, which besides making all the listing styles the same, gives me the ability to have more than one product on each line of the listing. (It includes the Column Layout Grid for Product Listing mod.) It wasn't immediately obvious how to style the listing to look like table cells, but I worked it out. See my retail site and click one of the categories to have a look at this mod in action.

Rob

Thanks Rob,
I'm selling water filtration systems with their replacement filters and want to create tables with the replacement filters in the table cells along the top row and the associated water filtration systems in the cells along the side column, with checks within the body of the table cells to indicate which replacement filters goes with which water filtration system. If a customer wishes to purchase a replacement filter, I want them to be able to click on the particular filter they've located along the top row of the table, while those who have decided on which water filtration system to purchase, should be able to click on that particular system found along the side column. Again, the check marks will indicate the functional of each complete water filtration system.

So, I'm hoping to be able to link the the various products found along the top row, and along the side column, to the their individual product description page. If I can do this, I wont need the category menu. Any thoughts ?

There is no mod that does anything like what you are asking for here. You will need to create a new page, probably a define page so you can use PHP if you need to, or maybe an ez-page will work. You can make up a static HTML table with the appropriate names and links in each cell; this would have to be manually maintained if your products change. If products don't change frequently, this may be the easiest solution. If you need the table to automatically follow your available products, you will need some PHP coding and possibly a new database table to store correspondences.
The correspondences may be able to be handled by linking replacement filter products to a category for each system they fit. Then you could look up the products_to_categories fields and populate cells accordingly.

Thanks Glenn,
So I should be able to link html described images to product description pages? How do I find out what the link addresses are and how do I keep Zen Cart from listing the product images?

There's no "keeping ZC from listing" anything here; you will have to build everything that outputs, so you have total control. For the link addresses, just go to each page you want to link to and copy/paste the URL in the address bar into your HTML.

in admin, shouldn't I be able to eliminate the columns that would display Zen Cart generated product listings? I know I can change the number of products horizontally, but can I put the value to zero to eliminate all product images from showing?

This has nothing to do with ZC admin. You will need to build a totally custom HTML page content for your table.

The html part isn't a problem, I just don't want ZC to impose its normal product listing.

If you don't have any links that point to product listing pages, you won't see them.

I've placed the HTML table in define_main_page.php and it works beautifully and links to the product description pages work fine, tho I'm having difficulty to discover how to call up a check mark graphic from my hard drive to my browser. Here is the path that works in my HTML editor:

<img src="file://C:/EasyPHP-5.3.6.0/www/TOXIC_WORLD/includes/templates/lavender/images/check.png" width="12" height="10" alt="" title="" border="0" />

But that doesn't work in my browser.

I like using the virtual server EasyPHP, but I need to upload my files to my host account so this kind of issue would be taken care of. The only thing is I'm still not confident Zen Cart can be shielded from hacking like the last time i tried. What can be done, if anything, to shield my new ZC install from being hacked? This has to be taken care of, or it's simply not worth messing with :cry:

What was the hack route before? The latest version of Zen Cart has no known vulnerabilities, though if your hosting or your pc is hacked/infected, nothing will really help.

Don't know what the route was. The browser opened a por'n site instead of my site. The admin opened as a white screen only. I just installed a shared SSL with my hosting account. Would you suppose that might help? I have a dedicated SSL with godaddy, but I'm very dissatisfied with them and am currently closing all my godaddy accounts. So now I'm ready to instigate a fresh install of Zen Cart v1.3.9h. Also, I continue to study the help files here. I'm just paranoid over my last experience.

Were you hosted with Godaddy? Search the forum for stories about them and repeated mass hacks over the past year or so. A host that takes security seriously and knows how to host e-commerce is important.

**Godaddy doesn't host my sites, I've been with hosting24 for years. They responded to my trouble ticket this way.

My questions:**
Greetings!

1. Does my filtercoupon.com gold account have a dedicated IP address?

2. Is HOSTING24 PCI Compliant?

3. Having installed the shared SSL, how do I use SFTP to encrypt FTP transfers?

Thank you

Their response:
Hello Robert,

1. Yes, every Gold account comes with the option to have a dedicated IP. Please let us know if you want to assign a dedicated IP on your account.

2/3. Please note only Gold package users can use SFTP. If you have the Gold package, please use the same SFTP login details which you are using to connect via SSH.

It's known that some standard FTP clients like Filezilla have problems connecting to SFTP. If you cannot connect, please download and install WinSCP software - it's designed for SFTP connections exclusively and works perfect.

We greatly appreciate this opportunity to service you. We hope that all of your concerns have been addressed. Please feel free to reopen this ticket if you need any additional assistance.

Kind Regards,
Eric K.
Help Desk Staff

Their response didn't say they're PCI compliant or not and the SFTP instructions were a little unclear when they mentioned SSH, an acronym unfamiliar to me.

Did you actually tell them you had been hacked and ask for help diagnosing or recovering from it?

Yes, and they offered a backup, but the problem was already in it. So I consider it water under the bridge and now look forward to creating something even better to my liking on top of a foundation of heightened security. I am following instructions to delete certain files and folders. I have installed a shared SSL and it works with https. but when logging on to my zc admin(have also changed that folder name), it gives me this warning:
**
Although this page is encrypted, the information you have entered is to be sent over an unencrypted connection and could easily be read by a third party.

Are you sure you want to continue sending this information?**

The information in question here is my admin username and password. Is there something I should/can do to add further protection at this point of information transfer?

Check out this thread: two security questions.

interesting, but it doesn't help to satisfy the warning:

**Although this page is encrypted, the information you have entered is to be sent over an unencrypted connection and could easily be read by a third party.

Are you sure you want to continue sending this information?

**The above warning is letting me know that even tho I'll be protected once I'm logged in, the transfer of my username and password will be public. How can I protect against that? I might add, this is a wifi connection.