Product Description

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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #118420 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 324 pages

About the Author

Suhreed Sarkar

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.

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Customer Reviews

Disappointing for developer
Disappointing for developer. Don't have any thing for developer that can use to customize zen cart. It's the only admin page usage.

Lots of information could be better on customizing
The book has lots of information but in more a tutorial form. This is good in some ways but when I wanted to create a template and make adjustments I went to internet resoruces instead. I supposed I was looking for a reference which was more how to do than a how to use.

Not a bad book, but could have been better for me. Might be perfect for someone looking to setup a pretty stock store and populate it.

totally worthless
I've set up Zen Cart for the first time, using this book as a primer.

In the course of getting everything configured and working, I've had many questions. None of my questions was answered by this book.

I've found answers in the documentation that comes with Zen Cart, I've found answers by searching online, I've gotten help in the Zen Cart forums, and I've figured out some things by trial and error... but not once has this book told me anything that wasn't obvious from looking at the screens.