Zen Cart is great an all but it really doesn’t do image galleries very well. There are some plugins available but to be honest the admin interface is always a bit erm “clonky” in my opinion. Why not use Flickr to serve up your glorious pictures as a gallery? [Read more…]
How to get correct Zen Cart product thumbnail when posting to Facebook [Updated: 26th Aug 13]
When users post a link to your products on Facebook, its nice for the automatic link to show a picture of an actual product.
Unfortunately Zen Cart doesn’t have this facility out of the box, but its not too tricky to add it yourself.
In your template’s html_header.php add the following lines for all the Facebook Open Graph tags:
echo $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];?>" />
if(META_TAG_PRODUCT_IMAGE=="META_TAG_PRODUCT_IMAGE"){?>
/includes/templates/YOU_TEMPLATE/images/logo.png" />
}else{?>
/images/ echo META_TAG_PRODUCT_IMAGE;?>" />
} ?>
Note: this is using a new DEFINE variable called META_TAG_PRODUCT_IMAGE.
This needs to be defined in your modules/meta_tags.php file.
(use an override for your template obviously by copying the existing one into a folder called YOUR_TEMPLATE. Also check what the default directory for your product images is – this code is assuming they are directly beneath the images folder. You’ll need to do extra work to figure ou if they are in more complex subdirectories)
In the line around 194 that is building the SQL to pull data from the products table add the following field to the list:
p.products_image
Then around line 208 below where it says // custom meta tags per product add the following line:
$meta_products_image = $product_info_metatags->fields['products_image'] ;
define('META_TAG_PRODUCT_IMAGE', $meta_products_image);
(Note: I have moved both lines together as it seemed to make it work on ZenCart 1.5. It looks like there were more if statements added in this version!)
Thats it. You can see it in work here http://www.thepartypirate.com and in version 1.5 http://www.framecraftonline.com
Surfplugs website launched
We’re excited to announce the launch of our latest website – for Surfplugs www.surfplugs.co.uk.
Rob at Surfplugs had wanted to update his site for a while and contacted Adam Wyatt at Flipside studio to produce a fresh new design, with the hope to launch his products internationally.
The wireframes for the site showed quite a complex array of features (an order workflow which included an interactive world map, video secion, gallery of team riders and an array of products – on top of the usual website CMS features such as Pages & File Library) So we made the decision to use a custom php based CMS which could be customised exactly to the client’s needs.
The front end of the site uses jQuery slideshows & carousels to display images and has an Ajax driven contact form.
Zen cart customer login problems
This one had me scratching my head for a while…
Built a new Zen Cart site, registered as a customer and added some products to my cart. All fine until I try to checkout, when I just get redirected to the home page after re-entering my credentials. Occasionally I’d get the ‘whoops, session expired’ message, but mostly KC was fairly unhelpful in its responses.
Turns out you need to go to ADMIN-CONFIG-SESSIONS and set the ‘Recreate Session’ flag to ‘false’. Absolutely no idea why, but it seems to fix the problem.
Gotta love it.
Sage Pay: Error 3085 : The FailureURL format is invalid.
Just a quick one.
If you ever receive this error when trying to put a purchase through via SagePay, dont spend hours wondering whats wrong with your FailureURL. Its nothing to do with that in most cases.
Double check that the Encryption Password you are using in your system is exactly the same as the one supplied by SagePay.
I have just spent an hour trying to debug my ZenCart module before checking the Encryption Password was correct.
Turned out the client typed in a lowercase “L” rather than an uppercase one – Doh!
