Free “Shop by Price” module for Zen Cart

February 7, 2010 in Zen Cart Add Ons | Leave a Comment

This is a simple “Shop by Price” or “Browse by Price” add-on module for adding a sidebox which can be used to display a few clickable price ranges.

Your customers can click on any price range to view a list of products within that price range.

The module will only search and match the price values without taking into account the currency chosen by your user. In other words, the price ranges in the sidebox are numbers which do not change with currency type.

Note: The appearance of your Shop by Price sidebox depends on your own template. This screenshot is from our Premium 6a template.

How to display Flash in Zen Cart banner locations

January 25, 2010 in Zen Cart Customization, Zen Cart Guides | Leave a Comment

You can display Flash at any location of your Zen Cart website by editing the design files (PHP). But this post will teach you how to display Flash content in the standard built-in Zen Cart banner locations — by using Zen Cart’s Banner Manager.

First, you need to have a working Flash file (SWF) — which can be created by Adobe Flash or Swish Max. Just make sure the dimension (width) of your Flash movie fits your template design. For example, the banner image width of our Premium 7 template is 930 pixels — so, in this case, you should design your Flash movie to have 930 pixels width, while the height is up to you.

Customize copyright year display for Zen Cart store

October 4, 2009 in Zen Cart Customization | 3 Comments

By default, your Zen Cart powered web store will display a copyright notice with the current year at the footer — where the current year is based on your web server’s system date.

Example:
Copyright © 2009 My Online Store. Powered by Zen Cart

If you want to change the year display format to reflect the year you start your business, you just need to edit a language file.

Example:
Copyright © 2007 - 2009 My Online Store. Powered by Zen Cart

Google Wave preview invitation is out

October 1, 2009 in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Google Wave, the real-time internet communication tool, has opened for “preview” users, with 100,000 invitations sent out.

It’s a combination of many popular internet tools — chat, social networking, email, collaboration, discussion, file sharing etc.

The collaboration and social networking features should be good for business users. And I think Google Wave can be embedded in Zen Cart sites to encourage conversation.

Unfortunately, I’m not one of the lucky ones to get an invitation. If you have an account, can you spare me an invitation/nomination? Please send to this email: s…@g…l.com

Add Google Maps to Zen Cart contact page

August 4, 2009 in Zen Cart Customization | 4 Comments

To add Google Maps to your Zen Cart contact page, two files need to be uploaded to your template folders.

Basically, you just need to download the files, change the details to reflect your business location/address, and upload.

For your convenience, I’ve separated the guide below to 3 major steps (STEP 2 is only necessary if the files already exist in your template’s folders).

Product listings display ‘bug’ in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8

July 21, 2009 in CSS, Zen Cart Customization, Zen Cart Guides | Leave a Comment

This issue can be seen on product listing pages using table and ‘colspan’ for displaying products — namely, the New Products, Featured Products and All Products pages.

By default, Zen Cart displays each listing with the thumbnail on the left, the product name/price etc on the right, then the product description below (in a cell that spans 2 columns. See the frame of the table cells for a listing:

Alert: Zen Cart security vulnerability and patch

June 28, 2009 in Zen Cart Guides | Leave a Comment

A vulnerability has been discovered in the admin area of Zen Cart version 1.3.8 and earlier versions. Please read further instructions, and download the patch from http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=130161

This patch works for previous versions in the Zen Cart 1.3.x series.

Please take the necessary actions as soon as possible.

Zen Cart rating stars images for dark and light background

June 8, 2009 in Free Images | 1 Comment

The original yellow/gold star images for the Zen Cart rating and review system are not suitable for dark colored backgrounds. As the images are saved as transparent GIF, you can see white fringes if your background is dark in color. See example below:

The original rating stars

You can create a set of images suitable for dark background, but this will work only if your whole page has dark background. If your sideboxes are dark but the main area is light in color, then it may not work, as you may see dark fringes.

Zen Cart and shared hosting

April 21, 2009 in Zen Cart Guides | 1 Comment

When I started to use Zen Cart some time ago, one of the first questions I asked was ‘Is shared web hosting good enough for running Zen Cart?’

Now, after a few years, and after dealing with a number of web hosting companies, I’ll share my experiences of using shared hosting.

Free Zen Cart Template 3

April 19, 2009 in Free Zen Cart Templates | 56 Comments

This is a minimalistic, yet elegant looking Zen Cart e-commerce template suitable for fashion related products (or well, any product you think suitable).