General question from Noob

I want to add a shopping cart to my Wordpress website. I have looked at many carts and plugins that my head is spinning. One of the main reasons is that most of them require purchasing competing plugin after plugin after plugin just to do the simple things. By the time you are done it's hundreds of dollars in plugins and licenses and you don't even know if you got the right on. I decided not to use any of the Wordpress plugins but use one of the standalone open source carts.

I was looking at Zen Cart website and I'm confused. Are the plugins free?

Also is there a discussion about how to make ZC look seamless when integrating into Wordpress?

Hi.
all plugins/add-ons listed on the menu link above are FREE.
But you are 'putting the cart before the horse', you need to install ZC then integrate WP into ZC rather than the other way around. It's very simple.
https://www.numinix.com/blog/2009/09/26/integrating-wordpress-into-zen-cart-1-3-8a/?main_page%3Dblog%26%2F2009%2F09%2F26%2Fintegrating-wordpress-into-zen-cart-1-3-8a

picandnix:

Hi.
all plugins/add-ons listed on the menu link above are FREE.
But you are 'putting the cart before the horse', you need to install ZC then integrate WP into ZC rather than the other way around. It's very simple.
https://www.numinix.com/blog/2009/09/26/integrating-wordpress-into-zen-cart-1-3-8a/?main_page%3Dblog%26%2F2009%2F09%2F26%2Fintegrating-wordpress-into-zen-cart-1-3-8a

The Numinix solution is great if one wants to integrate the blog into the store.. However, there are some sites that need the exact opposite..

There is no such animal as a Zen Cart on WordPress plugin available in the WordPress repository. So to display Zen art content inside WordPress requires manual methods/means. Even if there was a Zen Cart on WordPress plugin available, like the Numinix blog embedding solution, a shopowner/developer will still need to create a Zen Cart template and WordPress theme to make everything LOOK seemless..

Embedded content aside, one of the easiest ways to tackle the visual integration of a Zen Cart site with WordPress is to modify the Zen Cart and WordPress templates/themes to look alike/similar. One variation to this approach is to use the WordPress codex inside the Zen Cart template files to "wrap" the WordPress theme around Zen Cart.. (this involves using methods similar to how many of the WordPress on Zen Cart solutions work -- including the Numinix embedding solution)

For my clients, I've generally opted to build my Zen Cart template first and then build out my WordPress theme to match. I have found that this makes things easier as there are tools for WordPress theming that exist to ease the work.. The same is not true for Zen Cart. I have a two theming tools for WordPress I use regularly:

• Artisteer (a desktop theming app)
• Catalyst (WordPress theme framework)

Both of these tools make pretty short order of creating WordPress themes to match the Zen Cart template.

I have done some experimenting with creating a WordPress "wrap" theme (using Catalyst), but it's VERY beta, and not something I could easily share. Plus it would require those who wanted to take this code and run with it to have the Catalyst theme framework.. (and my code is based on Zen Cart v1.3.9 and an older version of Catalyst -- it's been a while since I messed with it) The principals of it are explained on the WordPress site where they explain how to display WordPress content outside of WordPress..