Integrate Zen into Joomla

I am currenty building a CMS website and store for which I am using Joomla and Zen Cart.

I know I can put my store in a wrapper menu entry on Joomla, but it doesn't look very good and I don't want to use any Joomla store, because I love the feel of Zen Cart.

Is there any way of integrating Zen Cart into Joomla properly as I want the Joomla to be my home page?

Help would be appreciated.

Thanks

I want the Joomla to be my home page
Can you explain what it is that you want in this home page that requires the overhead of joomla.

While not specifically a content manager, Zen Cart does have some facility for the management of content via ez-pages, you can have straight pages, a TOC page linked to ?? pages etc.

To use joomla and keep the appearance seamless, you will have to match the template styles any way and unless there is a very good reason for this, it is mostly counterproductive and only additional work for little gain.

You can have one look for the Zen cart main page, say no side boxes, and then in the shopping area, sides boxes on one or both sides or none by moving navigation to the top nav bar, or??

Hi Kobra

The Joomla site was destined to be main site to attract and eventually drive traffic to shop to generate revenue. I am looking to have news, works in progress (Its a model painting thing) (Blog style), Ebay feature section, articles, forum, etc. I am not sure if Zen could handle the amount of content I will hopefully be generating.

faulkns:

Hi Kobra

The Joomla site was destined to be main site to attract and eventually drive traffic to shop to generate revenue. I am looking to have news, works in progress (Its a model painting thing) (Blog style), Ebay feature section, articles, forum, etc. I am not sure if Zen could handle the amount of content I will hopefully be generating.

Also as I will be using Ebay to help generate traffic, I will not be able to link directly to a shop site without breaching their rules

Stewart

OK I see the reasoning, as EBAY rules are strict. Rather than trying to run ZenCart as a component of joomla, you might look at linking to your ZenCart shop and providing varying "home" & "main home" back links in Zen Cart. The other way can be done but I have not approached it from your direction but from using the 'framework' as a base for ZenCart and this is not simple.

Trying to get the two vastly different style engines to operate in unison with one another is a major task.

See what you think of running it as a link...

Thanks. I thought the linking URL would probably be the only way.

Never mind. At least it's clean and simple

Stewart

I am doing something slightly similar.

I have a zencart shop I have done, its quite popular, and the buyers all create things out of the items purchased and have requested that the shop owner have a gallery they can post to, discussion forum, etc etc, so I am building a Joomla site that will be linked from the main shop.

What I would like to do is be able to specify content to be displayed inside Joomla, say random products etc in various places, the simple idea to get sales from users of the forum pages (since guests are also allowed)

I have read something about a module that might work, but cannot find it, so wonder if Zen are perhaps working on something that can achieve this type of link, and even better would be a mod to allow users registered within Zencart to also be registered inside Joomla?

you might want to take a look at http://www.plastiquemonkey.com/ it is a combo of wordpress, singapore and zencart. The look was handled so well between the different parts (cms, gallery and cart) its sometimes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

hey, thanks for the link. i designed the plastique monkey site.

it's a wordpress blog in the root domain, with singapore gallery installed to /gallery/ and zencart installed to /shop/. i fussed around with the CSS until they looked mostly similar and added a tab menu stolen from the mistylook wordpress theme to tie them all together.

unfortunately for what you're trying to do, there's no real integration between the three sub-sites, just a lot of links (see this item on my blog, etc). i tried to use the external sidebox contribution to embed the "new in shop" zen sidebox in the wordpress sidebar, but the PHP involved was over my head. so i used an image rotator that i found on alistapart ("better image rotator", it's called) instead.

the shop is the only part of http://plastiquemonkey.com where people need to register. so i don't know how you'd keep people registered when moving from zen to zoomla, sorry...

your welcome. You did an outstanding job and I thought it might give some ideas. The fact that the different web apps aren't actually integrated is glossed over by the way you put it all together as a big package that "feels" like one entity. Once again good job.

faulkns:

Also as I will be using Ebay to help generate traffic, I will not be able to link directly to a shop site without breaching their rules

Stewart

I have studied the rules n this and apparenlty you CAN place a link directly to your shop but only inside the about me page of your ebay shop.

I have several clients that use this lophle, and it does generate alot of traffic to the shop

Hi Ive built a cart using Zen Cart. I would like to use the Joomla Simplicity Template for the HOME page and other pages within my site. My question is can i integreate Joomla for use with my pages( ie: FAQ and Newsletter and TOC and Contact US) with my cart pages with my zen cart?
Thank you- i also want to carry the header of the the Simplicity Temp on my CART page of Zen Cart.
If any of you have successfully done this can you just post a HOW TO-
:yes:

To the guy who made the plastic monkey site can you give a brief overview how you designed your categories box.

i.e the way they change colour when you hover over the categories and the way you inserted the little image before the categories. Thanls.

I have noticed that anytime someone expresses an interest, or query, into combining/bridging Joomla and Zencart, someone else is quick to defend zencart. I.E., "why would you want to do that?" or "zencart has CMS functionality built in". I thought I might throw in my 2 cents worth.

1. Zencart is the best shopping cart I have ever used. I have tried many different ones and now have 5 stores running Zencart.

2. Joomla is the future of CMS. If you need to put together a site, without a store, then Joomla will do it.

The programmer that eventually comes up with a real store, not one of those paypal things, is going to make a lot of money. I see this search almost everyday. People are constantly wanting to integrate their Joomla sites with a real shopping cart and the unfortunate answer is THERE IS NO SOLUTION AT THIS TIME. Lots of promises and lots willing to part you with your money but no solution.

Before you reply and say "did you try ***" the answer is yes, I did. I am still running the Zencarts and linking from my Joomlas.

If you decide to try or buy any of the "stores" that are being hawked right now I have one piece of advice for you. Read their forums before you spend one thin dime. Most of the admins seem to be on an extended vacation if you need support...

We keep asking why, because so far no one has supplied an answer. So I will ask one more time - What does the CMS add that Zen Cart is lacking?

Zen Cart is great, dont get me wrong, but Joomla has some very very nice templates availble that are layed out for you to manage & update content.
The way Joomla is set up by modules is a very good system. Zen Cart is sort of set up like that but not exaclty similar. If Joomla had a cart other then Virual Cart that was a seamless integration life would be good.
Zen Cart is a bit clunky to learn, or the learning curve is high.
If your an advance web dev, then im sure its a piece of cake.
X-cart offers some the same as Zen but makes it easier to admin and set up.
Ive played with all the demos for a few months now, and really just know the tip of the iceburg. Magento is another cart coming up. There is no download capability as of now but the dev promise that by the end of the year.
There is no really "perfect" scenario of doing a cart. If my skllls in web design matched that of my graphic design, i suppose i could do magic with Zen Cart.
But it is not very intuitive from a graphic design persepctive. Ive spent days trying to update the css style sheet to get it to look half way decent.
I still come up not pleased from a graphic standpoint, and very frustrated trying to solve the cart issue. Joomla really has design much more thought out, as soon as they come up with a cart solution, well that ole be the day.
Sorry for the ramble, just frustrated.

, Before you reply and say "did you try ***" the answer is yes, I did. I am still running the Zencarts and linking from my Joomlas.

If you decide to try or buy any of the "stores" that are being hawked right now I have one piece of advice for you. Read their forums before you spend one thin dime. Most of the admins seem to be on an extended vacation if you need support...[/quote]

Have you ever tried using a "script or bridge" from Joomla to your cart?
There is one available, i was wondering if you had tried it out?

As for linking to your Zencarts can you provide any url? I would love to see how you handled the design "seamless" issue, keeping your user thinking he is in one enviroment.

My background is more from the CMS side so I'll try to highlight some things that most CMS offer that Zen-Cart doesn't.

Templating - Specific types of content are designed to be displayed only with specific layouts and designs. Examples might be a news article, recipe, book review, upcoming event among others. A user would not have any formatting options, only fields to add text (headline, sub-headline, story text, date, ...,). In this way each item looks exactly the same and a user doesn't need to know any html at all.

Link management - in most CMS you can link from any point to any page or anchor in any page. I can select the page or anchor from a searcable list in the CMS when I create a link. I don't need to know the published path of the page. Any changes in the page will result automatically in changes in the link, e.g. the page is moved to an achive section, the page expires, the page is no longer front page news. Variations of link mangement can include automatically created lists of links to pages with selected key words or within certain date ranges.

File / Media Management - most CMS I have used have basic to fairly advanced media mangement. Files can be uploaded, categorized, often they can also be cropped as necessary. File or graphic selection is possible via a search. Often it is possible to identify which pages use a specific file or graphic.

Add-Ons - common add-ons or standard functions include calendars, photo galleries, rss feeds, navigation management, site map creation, forums, ...

These are just a few of the functions I could think of off the top of my head.

Zen-Cart is a great shop but it is definitely not able to replace the functionality of a CMS in the same way that shop add-ons for most CMSs are not a replacement for the functionality of Zen-Cart.

ryanp:

My background is more from the CMS side so I'll try to highlight some things that most CMS offer that Zen-Cart doesn't.

Templating - Specific types of content are designed to be displayed only with specific layouts and designs. Examples might be a news article, recipe, book review, upcoming event among others. A user would not have any formatting options, only fields to add text (headline, sub-headline, story text, date, ...,). In this way each item looks exactly the same and a user doesn't need to know any html at all.

Link management - in most CMS you can link from any point to any page or anchor in any page. I can select the page or anchor from a searcable list in the CMS when I create a link. I don't need to know the published path of the page. Any changes in the page will result automatically in changes in the link, e.g. the page is moved to an achive section, the page expires, the page is no longer front page news. Variations of link mangement can include automatically created lists of links to pages with selected key words or within certain date ranges.

File / Media Management - most CMS I have used have basic to fairly advanced media mangement. Files can be uploaded, categorized, often they can also be cropped as necessary. File or graphic selection is possible via a search. Often it is possible to identify which pages use a specific file or graphic.

Add-Ons - common add-ons or standard functions include calendars, photo galleries, rss feeds, navigation management, site map creation, forums, ...

These are just a few of the functions I could think of off the top of my head.

Zen-Cart is a great shop but it is definitely not able to replace the functionality of a CMS in the same way that shop add-ons for most CMSs are not a replacement for the functionality of Zen-Cart.

Thank you Thank you- you said it so well- Exactly

Nice clean site- what "template" did you use? Was it Bare Bones and you just formated? I dont see Joomla there am i correct?