ZenCart - any help gratefully appreciated

[dharrison]

Hi all

I have a customer that has an running e-commerce website. Their web master set up their site using ZenCart and no longer maintains the site. As a result, the customer has asked me to maintain his site instead.

I have MySQL, zencart and XAMPP desktop server already installed on my machine. And I know basically how to set up a site using ZenCart (as much as tutorials tell you). But is it easy to pick up where someone else has finished?

I have set up an MS Access database with ASP in the past. Is this similar?

Is there anyone on this forum that has been in the same situation and how did you get around this?

Any help will be gratefully received.

many thanks,

[cyanide]

Well, as in any program there is a learning curve.

I would suggest you check out the zencart forums or post here if you have any specific questions.
I am somewhat familiar with zencart/oscommerce

[frogmanandy]

Are you planning to move their hosting?

[dharrison]

Originally Posted by frogmanandy

Are you planning to move their hosting?

No. I don't need to.

Is there a standard admin page on ZenCart where you can add products to the database?

Excuse my naivety. :oops:

[frogmanandy]

If you don't need to change hosts, it should be pretty easy to manage

go to www.oscommerce.com and check out the forums and contributions they can be very helpful. When I first started playing with oscommerce I bought a book called "Building online stores with oscommerce:professional edition" it was very helpful at first, but you will quickly outgrow it.

to answer your question though ... the admin panel is very simple and mostly intuitive

most people have their admin located somewhere like /catalog/admin and it should ask you for a password which you will need both the username and password to access

you will see all the info you need to add products though the tax issues can be a little hard to figure out at first

as far as adding fuctionality to it, most of the mods you might need have been written and tested by the community and they are very easy to add using ftp a text editor and phpmyadmin. Just look through the contributions or ask in the forums.

sorry if I rambled a bit hope that answers your questions

[dharrison]

Thanx frogmanandy and cyanide.

It took me a while to twig that OScommerce was zencart. :oops:

I think the main thorn in my side is despite the site being set up using Zencart (which appears to be a visual package - correct me if I'm wrong), my customer was led to believe that his former designer programmed the entire site using hard code PHP.

And no amount of convincing on my part seems to work.

[frogmanandy]

Yes ZenCart and CRE:loaded are branches of oscommerce with some of the most useful and popular mods already added.

You can try to explain that oscommerce is an open source project written mainly in php that users from all over the world have taken part in writing and refining for their personal uses.

The web person in question may have built in their own mods and contributions to get the software to do exactly what they wanted. I have found in my experience that if I just ask on the forums, someone has already encountered my problem and has written a fix I can simply cut and paste into the current files. I have done a few minor tweaks myself but mostly it is not necessary.

[Paul B]

Originally Posted by dharrison

Thanx frogmanandy and cyanide.

It took me a while to twig that OScommerce was zencart. :oops:

I think the main thorn in my side is despite the site being set up using Zencart (which appears to be a visual package - correct me if I'm wrong), my customer was led to believe that his former designer programmed the entire site using hard code PHP.

And no amount of convincing on my part seems to work.

Just get them to loook at the code of any unparsed php page and they'll see something like:

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
// |zen-cart Open Source E-commerce |
// +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
// | Copyright (c) 2003 The zen-cart developers |
// | |
// | http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php |
// | |
// | Portions Copyright (c) 2003 osCommerce

etc etc.