Outcast.cz

I started to seriously work my eshop. The shop is based on Zen-Cart but making it work the way I want is quiet a lot of work. I haven't seen php in ages so the first day of staring into php code was a torture. At the end of the day I figured out how GET works and could start working on what I needed ^_^. Double face palm wouldn't help during the that night. But when I woke up in the morning and looked at some random php code I started to remember how it works.

Making changes in Zen-Cart can be tricky. If you want to change something you need to find all the files that have a certain code and definitions in them and change them accordingly and you can't forget about the configuration database either.

For the time being the changes I made are following.

• I changed the layout, styles, translated what I needed etc. CSS knowledge is enough for this...
  
• changed the layout to grid keeping row layout for singles(cPath variable solved my issue)
  
• added extra fields to my products table
  
• listed extra fields on category listing page (see image above) and on the single product listing page (after I told the configuration table about all the changes I made it started to work, a problem arose though. It inserted breaks in the column code and I can't get rid of them right now)
  
• created a search that can filter singles by color, type, edition and rarity. (it does not work well jet as I have problem with javascript that removes the initial string - for some reason I can't get it to work O_O. This is step one though as the search engine should be based on multiple choice checkboxes and I have no idea how zencart works with that. Gotta figure that out later)

There is still a lot of work to do and when I will launch the shop much more work will be upon my head. I have bunch of other scripts that help me with the administration of the web. I later got Apsona Shop Admin and I have to admit that it is good and powerful tool. I no longer need to use the administration in Zen-Cart.

Anyway by trying all this and browsing many files I came to understand how some things work in Zen-Cart.

The shop can be found at http://outcast.cz but is still in showcase mode.