Link directly to specific product or page

Hi all, I would like to have links on various pages on my website that would link to specific products or pages in the zencart shopping cart. I have given up trying to make zencart look like the rest of my site as I have done a lot with the CSS on my site that is custom and it's too much work to try and force zencart to look the way I want it to.
Basically I want to do either of two things:

1. Strip the header, footer, and sidboxes from zencart and use an i-frame to put the content in an html page, which I'm guessing is probably not a good idea.
2. Make links in my HTML web pages that would link directly to specific pages or products in zencart. Is there a way to do this. So far I can only get zencart to open in the main page, which is just going to be confusing to customers.
   I hate to say it, but the PayPal BuyNow buttons work much better for me, I just don't want to use PayPal if I can help it and have already set up a merchant account. I just want to use zencart for checking out. I don't want it to be my website.

Though I don't think what you want to do is a good idea, nor do I fully understand what you mean, but this thread may help you:

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=42105

You won't be able to mix your Paypal buttons with zencart though, but you can wrap your site around zen cart, with the mod above. You'll have to add your products to zen cart, use the zen cart add to cart buttons, AND use the zen cart checkout. But you may find that there is already a zen cart module available for your merchant account.

The other option (which I highly suggest) is to hire someone who is capable of making your zen cart match your site. I guarantee that it is able to be done....

In your main web site add a link that looks like this:

http ://your_site.com/your_shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products_id=16

the highlighted numbers would refer to your category and product.

Thanks for the replies. I will try both options although I hate to admit I don't really understand either one yet. I'm good with CSS but don't know much about PHP yet. I don't want to use PayPal buttons, I just want to have products and services for sale on my website without all the extra zencart baggage. I was able to force zencart to look a lot like my website but I really just want to embed links in my web pages to products and services and have them load into a shopping cart. That seems like such a basic simple feature that many people would want. I'm surprised there's not a simpler way to do this.
Thanks again for your help, John

JDR:

Thanks for the replies. I will try both options although I hate to admit I don't really understand either one yet. I'm good with CSS but don't know much about PHP yet. I don't want to use PayPal buttons, I just want to have products and services for sale on my website without all the extra zencart baggage. I was able to force zencart to look a lot like my website but I really just want to embed links in my web pages to products and services and have them load into a shopping cart. That seems like such a basic simple feature that many people would want. I'm surprised there's not a simpler way to do this.
Thanks again for your help, John

I'm curious, what features do you want to get from zen cart? Not being snotty, I'm just curious if things are just how you want them on your site, why would you want a zen cart? To me, the biggest advantage with zen cart is to be able to add products and information pages dynamically. In my opinion, having an HTML website where you have to add each and every product by hand.... then mixing that with only a portion of zen, seems more complicated to me than just using zen cart totally.

I appreciate the question.
On my site as well as others that I am building there will not be a lot of items or services for sale. I can see that if you are selling a huge amount of different products that the whole zencart thing would be great and it would be worth the time to set it up. I have done this on one site where they will be selling up to a hundred books at some point even though it took days to get zencart configured and looking more or less like the rest of the site. I had to hire a PHP programmer just to figure out a lot of the config stuff. Some of my clients just don't have the budget for that and I have used PayPal in the past to make it quick and inexpensive. However, having all the sales go into a database is a big plus and the main reason for using zencart. I just wish there was a scaled down version. I do CD replication as one of my services and advertise it on my website. I already have all the items for sale in a table, though I don't use tables for anything else. I just want to add a Buy button that would open the shopping cart with that item for sale populated in the shopping cart. I don't want to confuse people by just dumping them into the zencart shopping cart and then making them have to find what they were looking for all over again. It is going to be a lot of work to make a sepate zencart page for each different CD/DVD package I sell, but I guess that is what I'm going to have to do. Either that or I have to use zencart as the whole page that all my CD/DVD replication packages are listed on, but I can't control how the page looks well enough for that to be the best option. I have a Flash movie at the top of the page that I don't want to lose and I already have the page looking exactly the way I want. All I really want is a shopping cart that can add the items when they are clicked on, then log people on when they click check out, and add the info to the database. If there a better solution for this than zencart, I would appreciate the info. John

JDR:

Either that or I have to use zencart as the whole page that all my CD/DVD replication packages are listed on, but I can't control how the page looks well enough for that to be the best option. I have a Flash movie at the top of the page that I don't want to lose and I already have the page looking exactly the way I want.

Maybe I don't fully appreciate the complexity of your design, but I don't see why you couldn't control how the page looks well enough. Also, you can have your flash movie in zen cart as well, couldn't you?

Anyway, I sent you a PM as well.... :D

i think i understand what you are trying to do,i having a hard time to with my site, but i'm inching along, lol.
here is wht i thank you got to do, go admin creat a catagory, add a product to that catagory, after you do that , just go to the product page on zen cart copy the url , go to your site get the text or pic of the product you want to link , creat the link and put the url you copied from the product page in zen cart, i did that for my links in my page out side zen cart,if you understand i hope it helps

all so, you would have to creat a catagory for it product or a sub catagory,and get url link from the product discriptom pages, that way if somebody clik on the product on your site page they go direct to the product discription page of zen, where they will see the add to cart bottom and all other services strat from your main page , hope it helps

I didn't get the PM. I think my popup blocker killed it. I disabled popup blocker and reloaded this page, but it didn't show up. Can you send directly to
[email protected]

Here is a link to my replication page
http://www.discwritecd.com/replication.htm

And a link to my work-in-progress shopping cart page
http://www.discwritecd.com/store
I have not been able to get the bottom curves to show up no matter where I put them. I created a div just for that image and inserted it in various php pages , such as tpl_main_page.php, and tpl_footer.php, to see if it would work, but they never show. If I knew php and how it worked, I could probably figure this out, but I can't afford to hire a programmer to do this evertime I need to set up a simple shopping cart.
I'm tired of banging my head against the wall with configuring zencart to look like my site. Just want the shopping cart to work. Thanks for your help. John

now , jettrue you look like you know a lot about zen cart, i'm wundering if is there a way for me to change the "home link" on the the header of the main index page of zen to point to a page outside zen, wich is my html site home page , if any one have any idea please help, i looked all over, can't finde a way to do it

Well, I don't know much about zencart, but I do know how to do that.
Go to Incudes>Modules>Sideboxes>CustomFolder>information.php
Custom Folder is the folder name of your custom template if you have one.
replace the code for the home link with this
if (DEFINE_MAINPAGE_STATUS <= 1) {
$information[] = '<a href="http://www.discwritecd.com/index.htm">' . "Home" . '</a>';
}

Replace my website URL with yours and you can add as many links as you like that way. Hope that helps, John

One more thing. To add a link that isn't already listed in the information sidebox just add the link like this in the order that you want it to appear

$information[] = '<a href="http://www.discwritecd.com/about.html">About Us</a>';

That's all you need to do to add an additional link to the information sidebox.
Make sure to put the information.php file in a custom folder so it doesn't get overwritten if you upgrade zencart. John

thakyou, it does help, avery thang i learn here helps, still too fresh in the zen lol.
But by what you told me , this link would be in the information side box, i'm trying to change the "home" link in the very top of just the index page "the very first page of the zcart.
But thank you for taking the time to help.

To change the link at the top of the page you edit the tpl_header.php file

includes>templates>custom folder>common>tpl_header.php

Line 73 looks like this:

If you replace it with this:

And change "www.yourwebsite.com" to your domain name it will open your home page.
You might also want to modify tpl_footer.php the same way, so the link at the bottom of the page will be the same.

**Disclaimer! I am not a php programmer. I just fool around with this stuff until I get it to do what I want. You might want to talk to someone who really knows this stuff before trying this. There may be other files that need to be modified as well. John

Man, I tryied doing that before, but i didn't do it right, thank you so much, it worked perfect , just the way I wanted to do , thank you again.......