Zen Cart Tips and Tricks

As some of you will agree the lack of a spell checker in Zen Cart can be frustrating. As a primarily Firefox user I’m pleased to see a spell checker has been built into the program. Internet Explorer users do not have this luxury. Unless of course you install IESpell This neat little app will install a context menu, so when you right click in an input box you get the option to check spelling. See the pics below for an example. The great thing is you can use is on any input box, not just the ones in Zen Cart.
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If you have different categories in your shop then one area that can help with conversion is making the customer aware of the “department” they are in.
For example, take my pet site; My top level categories are products for dogs, products for cats, products for small animals and products for birds.

When you go into each of these categories/ departments you will see the images of the animals in the header changes to represent the department you are in.
So on the home page it rotates pics all different pets. In the dogs section you get pics of dogs, the cats section rotates cat pics, and so on.

This helps customers with navigating and knowing if they are in the right department for what they are looking for. If a customer is looking for cat products and they see plenty of cat references and images then they will know they are in the right place.
Amazon have adopted this strategy in a slightly toned down manner, by just changing the colours in the menu bar at the top, green for books, blue for music, purple for DVDs, etc.

I also think it helps with making your company specialised. I may be wrong, but it makes you look like you specialise and care about each department you have. But that could just be me.

Now on my site I have gone a step further by having the rotating image, which is a cool AJAX script (I come onto that later). The simplest way to departmentalise your shop is to just have a different image for each section. This could be a pic of the products you sell in that department or you could get a general pic, like I have. A good source of cheap stock images is Fotolia. It has some great image at high quality from just 57p (sterling).

Once you have picked out the images you want you then just need to edit your header.php file in your template to choose the right image for the category.
You will need to get the cPath of each category. To find category cPaths go to your admin page and select Catalog > Categories/ Products. The number in the ID column is the cPath ID.

1: Open includes\\common\header.php
2: Under (right at the top):

if (isset($_GET['info_message']) && zen_not_null($_GET['info_message'])) {
echo htmlspecialchars($_GET['info_message']);
} else { }

3: Add:

/*your first category*/
if ($cPath >= [CategorycPath] ) {
$categoryimage = ‘[imagefilename]‘;
/*your second category*/
} else if ($cPath >= [CategorycPath]) {
$categoryimage = ‘[imagefilename]‘;
/*[addition category images]*/
/*your default image for non category pages ie homepage, contact page, cart, etc*/
} else {
$categoryimage = ‘[imagefilename]‘;
}

Replace [CategorycPath] with the cpath of your chosen category and [imagefilename] the with the file name of the image (excluding the extention ie .jpg or .gif) you which to display. For each addition category replace /*[addition category images]*/ with

} else if ($cPath >= [CategorycPath] ) {
$categoryimage = ‘[imagefilename]‘;

You can add as many as you like.
Make sure your images are in the images folder in your template folder.

Next we need to put the image where you want to place it in your header.
Find where you want to put the image and place the following line:

get_template_dir(HEADER_LOGO_IMAGE, DIR_WS_TEMPLATE, $current_page_base,’images’) . ‘/’ . $categoryimage . ‘.jpg’) ;

This will create the image. Change the .jpg to your image file type.
You can move it around with CSS. But I’ll let you play around with that.
Upload everything and see if it works.

I leave it there for now, but I will show you how to do the cool image rotating in another post soon. In the meantime play around with what I’ve shown you and please do let me know how you get on. If you have any problems get in touch. I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can.

Hi Everyone

Thought I’d kick things of with a hello and a breif description of why I’m doing this.

Basically I have setup many Zen Cart Systems and even run a pet shop running Zen myself .
I’ve added many mods to zen sites. Some available on Zen Carts site, some from other zen site and some I’ve created my self.
I’m forever tinkering with my zen site so I want to share what I’ve done so, hopfully, your shop will benfit and may get you some extra sales.

I don’t usually do anything to the site unless I think it’s going to increase hits, conversion rate and usability.

Not everything I’ve done requires code changes and even if they did I keep it simple. I know a bit of PHP but I’m no developer. So it’s has to be simple whether I like it or not.

So basically here is a list of some of the areas I will cover over the coming weeks and months.

• SEO tips
• Conversion tips
• Usability tips
• Integrating plugings
• Reviews of plugins
• Code snippets
• Zen Cart Resources
• Plus much more

I hope you’ll keep checking back and checkout the latest tips.

Until then, happy Zenning.