Zen Cart Essentials Part I - Adddons

05 Nov 2009

Posted by P. Berge

Over the last few years I have coded a dozen or so Zen Cart sites. Each site has something new to teach me and I am constantly pushing zen to do things that I once thought were impossible. No matter how varied the design of the site, there are a few addons that I find myself using over and over again.

Image Handler: It may seem like everyone on the planet is connected to the web at broadband speeds, but that is no excuse to be serving up full resolution images downsized by the browser to display 80px thumbnails. I cannot tell you how many zen sites are out there with this exact problem. Pictures taken with a 12mp camera, uploaded straight to the server untouched and used for even the smallest pictures displayed on the site.
Zen Cart has the ability to use separate images for small, medium and large photos, but who wants to spend the time to process 3 images for every 1? This is where image handler comes in to save the day. Simply upload a single image at the largest size you require and image handler takes care of the rest.

Image sizes, compression quality among other options are all available through the image handler admin page.

For the sake of your customers, as well as your web host, please learn to love this addon.
Column Layout Grid for Product Listing: Choosing the next addon may come down to personal preference, but I feel that the standard product layout is rather ugly, displaying products one under another in a single column. This module will allow you to display your products in what I feel is a much more elegant way.
Once installed, head over to the 'Product Listing' page under the 'Configuration' menu. There will be a new option for layout style which can be set to 'columns'. The number of columns per row can also be set from this page, as well as choosing exactly what is displayed. I typically turn off everything except for the image, name and price. Product descriptions belong on the individual product info pages, not in the product listing.

Note:Don't forget to head over to the 'Maximum Values' configuration page and set 'Products Listing- Number Per Page' to an even multiple of your number of products per row. Set them to the same number for a single row, double for 2 rows, etc...
Easy Populate CSV: This addon is essential for any site that has more than 10 products. It will allow you to very quickly and easily import and export products from an excel spreadsheet.
I cannot tell you how much time this module has saved me.
Improved Attributes Controller: Product attributes are one area of Zen Cart that I feel could use some work. This module goes a long way into making them easier to deal with.
When adding attributes to a product you are presented with a list of attribute names (i.e. size, color) and a list of attribute values (i.e. red, blue, small, large). The list of values contains every single attribute that was created. If you have multiple product attributes, this list can become very cumbersome. The worst part is that you can only select 1 attribute at a time.

What this addon does is 2 things. First, selecting an attribute name will filter the list of values and only display the ones associated with the selected name. The other major improvement is the ability to hold ctrl and make multiple selections. For shops selling products with multiple attributes, this can be a life saver.
IE Specific Stylesheet and Javascript Over-rides: Anyone who has been coding websites for any amount of time has inevitably run into some cross browser compatibility issues.
This addon is very simple to install with only 1 file to load and it sets up the framework to allow you to include browser specific stylesheets in your Zen Cart site. If you want the styles to be applied to all versions of IE, simply create a stylesheet named ie_stylesheet.css and place it in your templates css directory. For specific versions of IE, just change the naming convention. ie6_stylesheet.css, ie7_stylesheet.css, etc...
Stock By Attributes: By default Zen Cart does not allow keeping track of stock based on product attributes. This means that if you sell t-shirts in small, medium, and large there is no way to indicate the one size is out of stock or to keep track of individual items with specific combinations of attributes as they are sold. This mod allows you to do just that.