Zen Cart: E-commerce Application Development

This book will teach you how to install, configure, and customize your e-commerce shop using popular open-source Zen Cart and how to use its promotion and public-relations tools to attract customers to the shop. It will also teach you to customize the look and feel of your Zen Cart shop by localizing and customizing templates.

In Detail
Zen Cart is a popular open-source PHP/MySQL-based e-commerce solution available under GPL that is designed to put the merchants' and shoppers' requirements first. Not only does Zen Cart offer a very long list of features, but the system is designed with both store owners and web developers in mind. There's no sacrifice of usability or power.

This easy-to-follow book will teach you how to install, configure, and customize a Zen Cart shop and use its promotion and public-relations tools to attract customers to the shop. It will also teach you to customize the look and feel of the Zen Cart shop by localizing and customizing templates. With this excellent tutorial, you will be able to extend and tweak the Zen Cart store.

What you will learn from this book

• Install and configure your Zen Cart shop
  
• Manage, import, and export products in bulk
  
• Configure zones, currencies, payment processors, and shipping modules
  
• Use discounts, salemaker, cross-sell and up-sell to promote products
  
• Use gift certificates, discount coupons, and newsletters to attract customers
  
• Localize your shop by translating and adding new language and locales
  
• Create or customize templates for your shop
  
• Migrate products and customers from osCommerce to Zen Cart
  
• Integrate Zen Cart shop with other CMSs like e107, xoops, gallery2, WordPress, phpBB, etc.

Approach
This is a highly practical book that can act as a reference material to which you will want to return again and again. The discussion in the book is right up-to-the point and it is filled with ample practical examples.

Who this book is written for
This book is primarily for professional developers interested in building, enhancing, or extending Zen Cart sites for customers. It is also a useful reference for those who have got Zen Cart running on their own store, and want to improve it. It will also benefit those who want to migrate from osCommerce or other engines to Zen Cart.

About the Author
Suhreed Sarkar—IT consultant, trainer, and technical writer—studied Marine Engineering, served on board a ship for two years, then switched to the computer world with MCSE in Windows NT 4.0 track late in 2000. His latest field of study is business management and he has earned an MBA from the University of Dhaka. He has a bunch of BrainBench certifications including PHP4, Project Management, RDBMS Concepts, E-Commerce, Web Server Administration, Internet Security, Training Development, Delivery and Evaluation, and Technical Writing.

As a trainer, he has taught courses on web design, development, and e-commerce. He also delivers lectures on MIS and e-business in public and private universities in Bangladesh. Being passionate about learning and teaching new skills, he prefers hacking and teaching to actual coding for clients.

As a consultant and trainer he has experience consulting for some international organizations including the United Nations, where he helped clients building and adopting their enterprise portals, large scale databases, and management information systems. He is the best-selling technical author in Bengali—having a dozen books published on topics covering web development, LAMP, networking, and system administration. As an open-source enthusiast, he is active in different forums and takes every chance to promote open-source CMSs and shopping carts including Joomla, Mambo, Moodle, WordPress, osCommerce, Zen Cart, etc.

While not busy with hacking some apps, blogging on his blog (blog.suhreedsarkar.com), reading the philosophy of Bertrand Russell or the management thought of Peter F Drucker—he likes to spend some special moments with his family—wife, son, and daughter. Suhreed lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh with his family.