New cart - Embedding in a webpage?

I'm about to start work on a barely started zen cart shop for a firm with whom I've just started, in conjunction with a website update.

Before I started in earnest, I wanted to check a few things out. I've searched for the following things in the forum, but have yet to find concrete answers.

• Security ~ I read that changing the name of the admin folder to something more secure is advisable, but can this be done with a shop that someone else has already started, or do I need to begin from scratch?

• As I am reworking the main website as well as the shop, I was toying with teh idea of embedding the cart in a page on the main site. Is this practical? Doable? Will there be security issues, or anything affecting orders? If so, are there any guides or forum posts that I should be focsuing my attention on?

Sorry if I'm just being dim and can't find the answers if they are already out there, and I appreciate any help you guys might be able to give!

:bigups:

oh, and another thill while I remember...

We use printmis.com/epro.aspx to manage stock, and want to know if zen is configurable to work with 3rd party stock management software? is this a problematic area?

Any help would be great, thanks...

You can change the name of the admin folder at any time. You just need to remember to change the references to it in the admin/includes/configure.php and includes/configure.php files so that Zen Cart knows where you've moved it to.

Embedding a Zen Cart inside a page isn't advised, but replicating a site's look and navigation in your Zen Cart so that you can link seamlessly to it is not too difficult is you have some basic web design skills, which it sounds as though you do. There's an example of that here. Where the site owner came to me with a flash site already under development but wanted a Zen Cart to sit alongside it to process orders. So, once you get past the flash, you'll see links that appear in both the flash site and the Zen Cart and allow you to move back and forth between them.

Thanks for that, I love the way the shop integrates in to the example site you showed me, that would be perfect for what I need to do.

Sounds like it's a lot easier than trying to embed it in a semi-flash site anyway.

My only other major query before I get cracking, is about integrating Zen stock controls into a 3rd party app we use here to monitor stock. How easy is it to do this, if at all? And are there any guides on this around?

Thanks again...

There's not a great deal of stock control in Zen Cart. Just a running stock total per product and a low stock email.

Provided you're not using product attributes, exporting this data is relatively straightforward, updating it from a spreadsheet using SQL wouldn't be that much more difficult.

So really this boils down to how the stock monitoring system works and how you want to integrate them. Not things that can be really be commented on with knowing them.

Hmmm, a potential problem then...

We're using E Pro, which I'm personally new to, but in the process of familiarising myself with. It's quite a high end stock and till system, as I'm told, it's great for managing stock, and we will be using SQL, which is great... but you mention using product attributes is a problem? The nature of the products (this is a print works, and stationary supplies place) there will be thousands of items with small variations in size, colour, etc, so the attributes is something we'd be using pretty heavily I'd imagine.

I've got 528 pages of E pro manual on screen now, I'd best get reading I reckon...

LunanLad:

Hmmm, a potential problem then...Not so much a problem, as extra complexity. It just means that you need the stock by attribute add-on and the data extraction would be from a different place and a bit more challenging.