Possible to use shop code outside of shop files?

Hi,

I'm working on a site:
Temporary address:
http://www.jfmco.com.customers.tigertech.net/
Future address:
http://www.jfmco.com

We'd like to add a shopping cart counter on the upper left of the normal site pages such as about.htm, etc.

I tried copying the cart code over (sorry, total php newbie here!) and tested it with the page as about.htm and about.php and got this error:

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /var/www/html/jf/jfmco.com/shop/new_site/about.php

Is it possible to use code from the zen cart & database that isn't part of the shop? I looked at the EZpages but I'm not sure those will do what we'd want since we have some fairly complicated template customization, which I have no problem doing in html, but no clue about how to do them using php.

My fiance mentioned that he thinks we need to just include the session variable, but I haven't found where that is done yet.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks!

Zen Cart is not a back end processor, so the short answer is no, you can't do that.

EZ-pages are html based. Look at the sites in my sig. The Fan Odyssey site uses EZ-pages for the "past events" pages. I copied the "guts" of the old html pages into the EZ-pages to create them.