Teething troubles, I hope

I read the post mentioning how (us) new arrivals get (very) frustrated. Yes :cry:
Boy have I got problems! (http://vowleyfarm.co.uk/ZenCart/index.php?main_page=products_all)

1. I want to display products in descending sort order. It's not alphabetic by anything at all, it's not by price, nor date, it's just the sort order that's provided, descending. How do I display by this order please?

2. We sell, amongst other things, a magazine, so far just printed copies, but now electronically too. So I have pricing by "virtual" or "printed". "Printed" is further priced. I only need three zones, basically postal costs; local country (UK), rest of Europe, and rest of the world. I am not going to fill in all the countries for either of the last two categories (seems like an enormous job). Do "attributes" fill this bill for me? It looks like they should, but having tried for two days now I can't for the life of me see how.

3. "Virtual" appears in the definitions, which is great, but doesn't seem to include the (pretty important it seems to me) idea of "unlimited". Wth is "stock level" doing showing up in a virtual product? How do I get this gone please?

4. In the "All Products" listing "weight" has appeared. How do I get rid of it? I've got it marked "0" on the "product listing" admin page, but it's still there. At this rate I'm going to have to become a nun :yuck:

It seems incredibly difficult to get to grips with this thing, marvellous as it looks. And I've been a s/w developer for years! :down:

Any help very gratefully received.
Mark

in lieu of answering your questions directly (lazy) I'm going to point you to
admin/config - work your way down that list. Of course at first very little makes actual sense but it all comes together.
Another place to look at is admin/catalog-products/producttypes-edit layout(rightside)

you can turn off displays of quantities and weights etc.

this doesn't really give you direct answers but you'll learn more about how ZC has been pieced together - I don't think you need to do any coding to get what you want.
I'd do some forum searches on those topics too.
It is designed to handle virtual products.

Thanks for that Wasana.

Yes, I've looked up and down those menu options, and indeed my face is now blue. However, it doesn't seem to help me (except in New Zealand), as I still can't work out the answers to my questions from them.

Thanks anyway.

Regards
Mark

Sorry I couldn't help - I thought the admin/config/all product listing would have gotten rid of the weight - might try the edit under catalog-producttype-edit layout too. I'm just fishing at this point.

While you're waiting for answers to these issues you might want to work on optimizing your images - took a long time to load your page and I'm on high speed - the all products page came in over 200KB - that'll eliminate your dial-up customers. Target should be well below 100KB, closer to 50... especially since the images aren't very readable anyway. Image handler in download section will do most of this automatically for you - great contribution - IH will give hover popup of bigger image too.

might be worthwhile breaking up the question into separate posts and hope that Kim/Ajeh or Dr. Byte come to the rescue...good luck

Yes, I'm surprised the weight's there. I'm sure it wasn't at first, ho hum.

And thanks for the picture size thing. I'd not really appreciated how many would get on the page, 20k is pretty small for a picture, but not when there's lots of them on a page :blink:

It's not really been US daytime yet, so I'll just twiddle my thumbs here (hah!) for a while to see if they can help ... :mellow: :mellow:

ttfn

Mark the portions you are wanting to edit are under :

Catalog / Product Types - then on the tupe you want to edit click edit layout.

This will allow you to turn off / on weights , quantity in stock, etc.

That will help solve at least one of your problems.

I am looking at the rest of your post to see if I can help more, but that for sure starts you in the right direction ;)

Thanks Tina,

that's got me looking around a bit more! (Not that I didn't before, honest!).

Actually the "weight" has showed up in the "All products" listing, and I've just seen the configuration option "all listing", I'm sure it wasn't there before! :cry:

The product types looks like a good way to start some of the bits I want, but how do I add more types? I don't see anywhere that I can do that :blush:

Many thanks for looking.

Regards
Mark

Mark I haven't ever done this personally, and I am in NO WAY a coder ( I leave the coding to my wonderful friends here ) but I did find this thread with info about adding product types :
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=35341&highlight=add+product+type

Hopefully that will help - if not I am sure that one of our more expert Zen coders will be able to help you :)

Thanks Tina,

If I'm not mistaken you're telling me there's nothing built to do this...

Diane's ("dbrewster") references don't seem to point anywhere any more, so it doesn't help a lot. I'll see what I can do, thanks.

There is a procedure for creating new product types, if not an automatic mechanism.

In the wiki, search for "product types" and you will find a tutorial describing the process.

Thanks Glen,

Now found it.

Regards
Mark