Yes, I said “opt for”! I said that because the features is already in the Zen Cart system, and No, we don’t have to create it from scratch.

Okay, the Zen Cart works like this. It first reads the default registration country and it will populate the State/Province tabs with the pre-defined details. Shops that are mostly selling and are having customers from the US have the luxury in enjoying the pre-defined states list. For the rest of the world, you will have to create one on your own.

Anyway, enough of the theories. To enable the pull down option, you need to:

1. Login to your Zen Cart backend admin screen;
2. Browse to Configuration >> Customers Details;
3. Look for the “State – Always display as pulldown?” and select “true” from there.

There are 2 ways that you can disable the salutation (the Mr.  & Ms. thing) that are being ready for selection during the account registration. They are the hard way and the easy way.

The hard way require you to edit a few php files and have them uploaded to the server via a ftp program. Of course, you might not want to do that if you knew what the easy way that I am going to tell you in the follow section was.

To disable the (salutation) option, you need to:

1. Login to your Zen Cart backend admin screen;
2. Browse to Configuration >> Customers Details;
3. Look for the “Email Salutation” option and select “false” from there.

See, it is very easy.

Please also note that by removing the salutation options, it will stop the displaying at the account registration screen as well as stopping it in showing on any outgoing emails.

Open up <ZenCartRoot>/includes/modules/create_account.php, or <ZenCartRoot>/includes/modules/YOUR_TEMPLATE/create_account.php if you are using the template over ride system.

Now look for the lines which said:

// send welcome email
if (trim(EMAIL_SUBJECT) != ‘n/a’) zen_mail($name, $email_address, EMAIL_SUBJECT, $email_text, STORE_NAME, EMAIL_FROM, $html_msg, ‘welcome’);

Common out the zen_mail() function and you will be good to go.

There are over 20 different side-boxes that comes with the standard Zen Cart installation. Not to mention any specially added boxes. Imagen you have to switch into a newly designed Valentine’s day theme and had to reset all of the side-boxes, its such a waste of time.

One of the add-ons that can help to solve this problem is the “Save your sideboxes layout as the default”. It actually helps you to save up the original “classic” template’s side-boxes arrangement as the default setting by a click of a button. You will then be able to apply such saved settings to the new template by clicking on the apply button. As simple as that.

You will be able to download the module from here. It is also Zen Cart version 1.3.9 tested.

<div class=”buttonRow back”><?php echo zen_back_link() . zen_image_button(BUTTON_IMAGE_BACK, BUTTON_BACK_ALT) . ‘</a>’; ?></div>

As you can see from the following image capture, the title will actually be the main title of the search results.

Zen Cart provide a dynamic method in generating the title. For example, if you are viewing one of the product at the cart, the default displaying are The Product Name, Product Code, Product Price and The Title of the site.

There are ways that you can change the arrangement for the title, and you should be looking at <ROOT>\includes\languages\<YOUR LANGUAGE>\meta_tags.php and <ROOT>\includes\modules\meta_tages.php.

The first meta_tags.php file allows you to define your site’s Title, Tagline and Custom Keywords etc. So, if you are looking for a way to change the default header from “Zen Cart! The Art of E-commerce” to something else. You should be looking for line 11 and 14 to change the TITLE and SITE_TAGLINE.

The second meta_tags.php file is responsible for the dynamic generation of the header. It provides all the methods for changing the content of the header with conditions. The comment should provide you some clear instruction on which part of the file needed to be adjusted.

You will not be able to do that directly form the backend admin interface of the Zen Cart. To do that, you will have to locate and edit the category_row.php at <ROOT>\includes\modules\.

Let’s say you wanted to remove the category name under the category image, look for the “$categories->fields['categories_name']” and remove it along with one of the dot (either in front or behind) with it.

Save the file according to the template override standard.

homebrewkits at the Zen Cart Forum had been asked for the setting on “Goods value postal charges Orders up to £5-00 postage charge £1-50 Order value £5-00 – £9-99 postage charge £2-50 Order value £10-00 – £64-99 postage charge £5-95 £65-00 and above POSTAGE FREE.”.

Here is our resolution to it:

• Login to your Zen Cart store admin interface;
• Browse to MODULES >> SHIPPING;
• Select the “Table Rate” and press either edit or install from the right side menu;
• User “4.99:1.5, 9.99:2.5, 64.99:5.95, 1000:0″ at the Shipping Table field area;
• Select “Price” at the Table Method field;
• Press Update to confirm the changes.

By selecting “Price” at the Table Method field, the “4.99:1.5, 9.99:2.5, 64.99:5.95, 1000:0″ at the above which actually speaks upto 4.99 currency units, the shipping cost will be 1.5 currency units and 64.99 currency units will cost 5.95 currency unit on the shipping, etc. The last part “1000:0″ is just a dummy to be used to say upto 1,000 currency units will cost zero for the shipping. So, anything with currency units between 65 and 1,000 will cost nothing for the shipping (This is the tweak for free shipping over certain cost).

There are actaully 3 steps which needed to be done to have the graphical button to replace some of the text. They are:

• Create the button;
• Define the button at Zen Cart; and
• Show the button at the store front.

Create the button

Find yourself a nice graphics software to create yourself with a button. Save the button to <ROOT>\includes\templates\YOUR_TEMPLATE\buttons\YOUR_LANGUAGE\ folder.

Define the button at Zen Cart

Zen Cart actually store the button’s detail in button_names.php (You will be able to find it at <ROOT>\includes\languages\YOUR_LANGUAGE\). There are 2 things that you will have to do in here, define the graphics name and the alternative text . Let’s use the login button as an example:

define(‘BUTTON_IMAGE_LOGIN’, ‘button_login.gif’);

The ‘BUTTON_IMAGE_LOGIN’ part is the Zen Cart system name of the button and the ‘button_login.gif’ part is the actaul file name of the button.

define(‘BUTTON_LOGIN_ALT’, ‘Sign In’);

The “BUTTON_LOGIN_ALT’ part is the system name of the alternative text and the ‘Sign In’ part is the printed alternative text when the image are not showing.

It doesn’t matter were you are putting the newly defined “defines”. And Yes, remember to save the file according to the template override standard (if you are not using it, just save it as it is).

Show the button at the store front

Well, I am lazy, I did not create any new buttons but I am going to use the Login button to replace the login text at the header. To change the text into the button, look for <?php echo HEADER_TITLE_LOGIN; ?> and replace them with <?php echo zen_image_button(BUTTON_IMAGE_LOGIN, BUTTON_IMAGE_LOGIN_ALT); ?>. The “zen_image_button” is the standard “draw button” function within the Zen Cart.

That is it. You should be able to find the results you want at the preview browser now.

Have fun and keep it Zennish!

But, if you really want to do it, there is a way that we can “hack” around the problem. We can date back the product creation to the period that had defined as the “new product period”. Let’s say your defination on new product is limited to 14 days prior to the date of viewing. so, setting the date of creation to any date before that will be good (and it won’t be selected as the new product).

We can use tools such as myphpadmin to get access to the database table and alter the product creation date (products_date_add) field at the product table to 14 days before the current viewing date. That should work, very easy!