New to Zen-Cart and Need Help!

Hello everyone, I am brand new to zen cart, and am having a terrible experience. I have been trying to figure this out for the pst 2 days and am getting no where. Hopefully someone can help.

I have a hosting account set up with siteground.com and they have installed the zen-cart onto my domain name, everything seems okay when I get to https://www.mydomain.com/shopping/admin. When I log in I get to the admin screen I have figured out the configurations and such but am trying to design the zencart. I have searched several websites and have seen where I need to rewrite some code in my files mainly language/english file. For example I want to change the "congratulations you have installed Zen-Cart" and see where I need to change some things in the file
Question is where do I find these files to do this in. I have searched the MySQL and PHP section on my hosting site but nothing is there.

Also this may be a dumb question but is the zen-cart my actual database, or is there another database that I should be using?

Howdy and Welcome to the Forum. :smile:

The database used, is or should be, used only for your account.

At the top of every Forum page is a link to "Tutorials/FAQ" and can help to answer many of your questions.

Do yourself a favor and download a copy of Zen Cart to your local drive (your computer) and unzip it. You don't have to be able to run it, but having a local copy will enable you to see the folder/file structure and understand what you're being instructed to do. You can do all your editing locally and FTP the results up to your website.

To create a very basic custom template (you can build from there), you need:

• includes/languages/YOUR_TEMPLATE/english.php
• includes/languages/english/YOUR_TEMPLATE/index.php
• includes/languages/english/YOUR_TEMPLATE/header.php (to change the logo)
• includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/template_info.php
• includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/common/tpl_header.php
• includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/common/tpl_footer.php
• includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/images/logo.gif
• includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/css/stylesheet.css

Anywhere you see a /classic/ folder, you can create a folder for your custom template. You can copy the necessary files from either the /classic/ folder, the /template_default/ folder or the parent folder.

Edit includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/template_info.php to give your template identifying information so you'll recognize it in the admin under tools->template selection.

Always, always, ALWAYS use a good text editor to edit php files. Crimson Editor is a good one (and a free download!). You can also use Notepad which is included with Windows.

FileZilla and SmartFTP are good, free FTP clients.

HTH!