Zen Cart Tips and Tricks

Zen Natural Zen Cart Template

Warren — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:45:59 +0000

Zen Natural is a free Zen Cart template based on the play.com template concept I did a while back. Live demo available here This is the first release so needs a little more testing and I also plan to add more to it. You can report any issues with this template in the forum as [...]

Increase selection boxes in Zen Cart admin

Warren — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 12:52:46 +0000

Here’s a quick tip for you! It might not change your life, but will make life easier when adding new featured and special products. It’s always annoyed me that the box where you select the product to feature or add as a special is so small. 5 lines to be precise. So I set about [...]

Free Zen Cart Buttons For All

Warren — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 13:49:36 +0000

Took a break from the normal goings on and create 3 coloured button sets for Zen Cart. There is a blue set, red and green. If you would like to see them in more colours, let me know which colour you would like and I’ll get them posted up. This set have been create for [...]

SEO for Zen Cart Categories

Warren — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 18:30:41 +0000

One of the problems I find with e-commerce sites is it’s difficult to get chunks of content for search engines to get a hold off. E-commerce sites tend to be product images, one liner product titles, with the best opportunity of getting any real keyword-rich content being the product description or category description. It’s important [...]

play.com Zen Cart Template Concept

Warren — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:19:35 +0000

I decided to try and recreate the play.com web site layout in Zen Cart. Just because I thought it might be a good way to show how flexible the Zen Cart template system can be. Plus it was a good excuse to not have to do my accounts I managed to do the bulk of [...]

How to change the width of a Zen Cart site

Warren — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 12:37:10 +0000

If you’ve got a standard setup of Zen Cart using the default template then to change the width a Zen Cart site open includes/templates/classic/css/stylesheet.css with your favourite editor. Search that file for #mainWrapper you’ll see a line under it saying width: 750px (or whatever the current width is). Just change the 750 to the pixel [...]

Add a ‘new’ symbol to your latest products

Warren — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:44:39 +0000

Ever wanted to put a ‘new’ sticker on your product pages? Well here’s what you do; Create a little eye catching graphic that says New or NEW PRODUCT. Then pop your graphic in includes/templates/<your template folder>/images and call it new.gif Once you have done that open includes/templates/<your template folder>/css/stylesheet.css at the bottom add the following [...]

Show off your Zen Cart site

Warren — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 17:03:57 +0000

I’ve just put the finishing touches to a new directory for sites powered by Zen Cart. The only conditions for submitting a site is you must have the Powered by Zen Cart text and link in the footer of your site. The directory is completely free and you don’t have to link back to this [...]

Quick tip #2: Find admin options quickly in Zen Cart

Warren — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:18:58 +0000

One great aspect of Zen Cart is the flexibility to change configuration options. Whether it be the number of new products to show on the front page to how the product listing page displays the products. This is all great, but with so many options available it’s not always easy to find them. This is [...]

Quick tip #1: Use singular and plurals in product descriptions

Warren — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:41:18 +0000

After posting about getting site search data from Zen Cart it reminded me of a great tip. The site search function on Zen Cart is not great with plurals and singular words. For example if you have a product titled Dog Coat and a visitor searches for Dog Coats, that product will not show up [...]