I don’t know about you but I need passwords daily – hell even hourly. To login to clients FTP sites, to login to CMS’s, PayPal accounts, MySQL databases.At any one time I have about 10 current passwords running round my head.
Then – boom – like a bolt out of blue I’ll get a request for either some work on an old web site – or a client who’s forgotten how to login to SagePay.
So what I would normally do is trawl through all of my old emails where they might have sent me a copy of their login credentials (and I might have had enough forethought to mark with a reg flag in my inbox so I knew it was actully something important) – but all in all it would take minutes of my precious time, and distract me from the matter in hand.

Imagin my horror when one of the agencies I work for asked for a spreadsheet of all the FTP logins, Zen Cart logine & hosting logins for their set of clients! Aaargh!! To collate that would take days…. I complained!

But do you know what? It didn’t actually take that long at all. I sent them back an Excel spreadsheet, with each clients details on a separate tab, and each sheet contains every password, username & url link one could possibly need to manage their online sites.
So now I have done the same for ALL my current clients – everytime a new client signs up – he/she immediately gets a new tab and I can just copy and paste the relevant detail into their tab.
OK it doesn’lt always look pretty – but its always to hand – evidenced by the fact that its almost always open on my machine.
I have taken the basic security precaution of password protecting the spreasheet in case it fell into unwanted hands – but I think I can manage to remeber one password.

It would be interesting to know any other developers tips for managing this issue

Admin > Configuration > Index Listing
has options to turn off what sub-center boxes appear across the site – eg Featured, New, Upcoming & special products
So its not just for the main home page but it affects all the category pages & product pages too

I’ve needed this in every ZenCart install so far to set up European specific country codes:

BE,BG,CZ,DK,DE,EE,IE,EL,ES,FR,IT,CY,LV,LT,LU,HU,MT,NL,AT,PL,PT,RO,SI,SK,FI,SE

Courtesy of : http://publications.europa.eu/code/pdf/370000en.htm

Let me know if anyone knows of any changes to this

I was just checking out some recent stats on Google Analytics for a small e-commerce site – and I was quite surprised to see such a spike on Monday 30th November – so called “Cyber Monday”
You can see the site got more than double the number of hits and then it went back to normal.
See and I thought it was all a marketing ploy!

I can’t believe it hasn’t been done yet – that there isn’t a mod out there to add a nice landing page for each manufacturer that you get to from clicking the Manufacturer from the sidebox on a Zen Cart site.
But try as hard as I could I couldn’t find that functionality anywahere – not hidden in the code of Zen Cart or in the forums.
So I thought I’d have a bash at it myself.
Warning the code is very basic – probably lots of room for improvement but for now it seems to be working.

1) Make sure that one or more of the Manufacturers in the Zen Cart Admin has an image associated with it (in my case the image needs to be no wider than 590px or it breaks the design)
2) We are going to be using the Manufacturer URL as the Description field – hey I don’t want to be messing round with the databaase and the 255 chars we can add here will be good as a brief description for the Manufacturer

3) Edit the tpl_index_product_list.php (in templates) and at around line 18 add the following (inside php braces)

Save & Upload this.
What you should find now is that when you go to a page with a manufacturers_id query string it will look in the db to see if there is an associated image and or url (in this case description) and display that

As a final touch you may want to update the Manufacturers page in the Admin section so that the label Manufacturers Url is changed to Description – and that a textarea box is shown rather than the small input field

1) Edit the file admin/manufacturers.php
2) At about line 255 replace this line

$manufacturer_inputs_string .= ‘
‘ . zen_image(DIR_WS_CATALOG_LANGUAGES . $languages[$i][‘directory’] . ‘/images/’ . $languages[$i][‘image’], $languages[$i][‘name’]) . ‘ ‘ . zen_draw_input_field(‘manufacturers_url[‘ . $languages[$i][‘id’] . ‘]’, ”, zen_set_field_length(TABLE_MANUFACTURERS_INFO, ‘manufacturers_url’) );

with this line

$manufacturer_inputs_string .= ‘
‘ . zen_image(DIR_WS_CATALOG_LANGUAGES . $languages[$i][‘directory’] . ‘/images/’ . $languages[$i][‘image’], $languages[$i][‘name’]) . ‘ ‘ . zen_draw_textarea_field(‘manufacturers_url[‘ . $languages[$i][‘id’] . ‘]’, ‘soft’, ’50’, ‘6’,”);

3) Just below that replace

$contents[] = array(‘text’ => ‘
‘ . TEXT_MANUFACTURERS_URL . $manufacturer_inputs_string);

with

$contents[] = array(‘text’ => ‘
Manufacturers Description (max 255 chars)’. $manufacturer_inputs_string);
}

4)A bit further down (line 290 ish) replace

$manufacturer_inputs_string .= ‘
‘ . zen_image(DIR_WS_CATALOG_LANGUAGES . $languages[$i][‘directory’] . ‘/images/’ . $languages[$i][‘image’], $languages[$i][‘name’]) . ‘ ‘ . zen_draw_input_field(‘manufacturers_url[‘ . $languages[$i][‘id’] . ‘]’, zen_get_manufacturer_url($mInfo->manufacturers_id, $languages[$i][‘id’]), zen_set_field_length(TABLE_MANUFACTURERS_INFO, ‘manufacturers_url’));

with

$manufacturer_inputs_string .= ‘
‘ . zen_image(DIR_WS_CATALOG_LANGUAGES . $languages[$i][‘directory’] . ‘/images/’ . $languages[$i][‘image’], $languages[$i][‘name’]) . ‘ ‘ . zen_draw_textarea_field(‘manufacturers_url[‘ . $languages[$i][‘id’] . ‘]’, ‘soft’, ’50’, ‘6’, zen_get_manufacturer_url($mInfo->manufacturers_id, $languages[$i][‘id’]));
}

5) And just below that replace

$contents[] = array(‘text’ => ‘
‘ . TEXT_MANUFACTURERS_URL . $manufacturer_inputs_string);

with this

$contents[] = array(‘text’ => ‘
Manufacturers Description (max 255 chars)’. $manufacturer_inputs_string);

There you have it a simple way of creating a Manufacturer’s Landing Page in Zen Cart!

See it in action here:
Billabong Landing Page on SurfsideOnline

Comments, suggestions, improvements always welcome though!