Is this possible with Zen Cart?

Hi folks

I've recently moved over to using Zen Cart on a few projects and am really liking the way it works - the fact that it just does a lot of what I need it to do!

Now, I've got a new project where the site will consist of:

• some general pages (home, contact etc.)
• a gallery of artwork (not for sale)
• ecommerce section
  and the whole site needs to be content managed (i.e. the client can edit/update herself).

I know I can use Zen Cart for the ecommerce side of things but is it possible to use it for the whole lot, including administering the gallery?

I'd appreciate any thoughts/advice on this.

Cheers, Emily

webfooted;

Are you asking if you can use ZC for non-ecommerce purposes? If so, the answer is absolutely YES!!! I have done quite a few church sites with zc and have turned off the shopping cart features until (if and when needed). I hope this answers what you are asking.

Good Luck :smile:

Sincerely,

Shawn

Hi Shawn

That sounds promising. Have you got any pointers as to how to go about it?

Cheers, Emily

webfooted;

What I do is first install the following mod: Save your sideboxes layout as the default.

http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=260

Then turn off all the sideboxes that I DO NOT want. Go under the admin - modules shipping and order total and turn everything off. Decide if you want you boxes to be on the left, right, or both. I prefer the left myself as it also allows the widening of the main area in the middle of the screen.

This should get you started and you will have to play around with it a bit. You can check out a couple of sites I did this way for examples at:

www.getvictory.org

and one of my main sites at www.bornagaintechnologies.org

Please post any more questions you have from there and I will do what I can to assist you.

Sincerely,

0be1

Thanks for that, that's really helpful. Will see how I get on.

I'm going to give this a go myself. My nephew needs a professional website and I've been poking around for content management ideas. Since I'm familiar with the way Zen Cart works, I might as well see if it'll do the trick.

Depending on what you are wanting to do (so far I have not found anything that zc can't fit the bill for) it should be perfect for it. Like you, I am somewhat used to zc now and that is why I started designing non ecommerce sites with it to see outside of a shopping cart what else it could do. Also check out some of the sites in the zc gallery to get some ideas of what others are / have done for inspirations as well.

Good luck and may the force be with you:cool:

0be1

I've also built a personal website about our favorite redneck sport using Zen Cart. I find the built in banners great for info on upcoming events. Some of
the contributions I use are Ajeh's EZ Page TOC sidebox for a picture gallery,
the About Us contribution for extra pages, and the Newsletter Subscribe.
And of course, User Tracking to see where folks are coming from.

Works really well! Thanks, Zen Cart team! :clap:

My nephew is a journalist and needs/wants a website to display some of his work. I think this'll do quite nicely if I can get it worked out in my head. I should look a the sites he sent me as samples to get the terminology down.

0be1, I really like what you've done in this direction. Is everything "document general"?

Afo;

Which of my sites were you referring to they are done differently.

0be1

I took a peek at getvictory.org.

afo:

My nephew is a journalist and needs/wants a website to display some of his work. I think this'll do quite nicely if I can get it worked out in my head. I should look a the sites he sent me as samples to get the terminology down.

0be1, I really like what you've done in this direction. Is everything "document general"?

This is document nothing :cool: It is actually ez-pages as additional sideboxes. It was the only way I could figure out how to do it at the time.

0be1

0be1:

This is document nothing :cool: It is actually ez-pages as additional sideboxes. It was the only way I could figure out how to do it at the time.

0be1

Ah, ok. I'm going to play around with it and see what I can do.

I've done this as well with great success:

http://www.ccfaq.org

Mind you, we're going to be moving to a wordpress solution; our goals for the site need the rss broadcase abilities that Wordpress affords. We just strip out the 'blogginess' of Wordpress and it looks like a ready made site.

http://www.ccfaq.org/new/install/

But Zen has SO many more uses than 'just' a shopping cart!

ThePatch:

But Zen has SO many more uses than 'just' a shopping cart!

Although I mainly use Zen to build ecommerce sites I have just started to build a ZC based site for a property rental company.
I was going to use a CMS but found ZC so much easier to build with the client in mind.
Everything is there that i need, just turn the 'store' side of things off and away you go!

ThePatch:

I've done this as well with great success:

http://www.ccfaq.org

Mind you, we're going to be moving to a wordpress solution; our goals for the site need the rss broadcase abilities that Wordpress affords. We just strip out the 'blogginess' of Wordpress and it looks like a ready made site.

http://www.ccfaq.org/new/install/

But Zen has SO many more uses than 'just' a shopping cart!

Patch;

I like the second one much better. My next site I want to find a way to implement nifty cube (used to be nifty corners) and you can see it here:

http://www.html.it/articoli/niftycube/index.html or more specifically like this one:

http://www.html.it/articoli/niftycube/nifty6.html

I have not found a lot of zc users tempting this one yet. zc can do sooooooooo much more when using css styling and the boring square things are a thing of the past. We need to start livening our sites up more (IMHO).

shalom,

0be1