SEO9oneone » Zen Cart

Canonicalization – What is it?

reitz — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:18:18 +0000

This is important. The latest version of ZenCart includes this AND the latest version of WordPress has this as well… upgrade folks and become more canonical!

8 Canonicalization Best Practices In Plain English.

Zen Cart v1.3.9a — Officially Released!

reitz — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 01:45:15 +0000

Zen Cart 1.3.9a is FINALLY HERE! The wait is over folks! Huzzah! and Hooray! Some killer upgrades are finally here! I’ll give a breakdown on what is in this over the next week!

via Zen Cart v1.3.9a — Officially Released! – Zen Cart Support.

ZenCart 1.3.9 BETA is now AVAILABLE

reitz — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:32:19 +0000

Please note this is ZenCart 1.3.9 BETA! TEST ONLY! Report back to the forum here! Do not use this on a LIVE Site folks!

v1.3.9 BETA AVAILABLE – Zen Cart Support.

ZenCart Multi-Site Google Base Configuration

reitz — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:26:57 +0000

Ok, this is for Zen Cart people running multi-site stores…I call them MALLS as you can have however many domains pointed at the site that you want… an unlimited amount actually… only limited by how many domains you want to purchase… and each domain can have its own set of products independent of others (recommended to do it this way and NOT share products/items/categories across domains as it gives a duplicate content penalty in Google, so keep each independent!) BUT as part of this, the multi-site breaks some cool mods that just don’t work very well… I had looked at the complex code and just figured I’d work up a relatively easy workaround… this one is for GOOGLE FROOGLE MODULE to create the feed for Google Base (now called Merchant!) which pushes your products out into the Google Products Search which a LOT of times also ends up in the regular Google search at the top of the listings. THIS LAST PART is WHY it is important! As it provides your link AND an IMAGE and a PRICE.

If you click to “Shopping results for nike air show” you’ll see a screen like this.

Ok, so if you don’t know it is FREE to get listed in this… if you know how! Well the Google Froogle zencart mod absolutely does this! All you’ll need is a Google Account to set it up, and then with some automation on your server AND from Google Base you can get your UPDATED inventory from your ZEN CART to update the Google BASE / Shopping / Products to have and show your current inventory with a very high LISTING on Google (ONLY IF YOUR product content and item names are properly “keyword”ed will this be ranked highly!)

Ok so for regular zencart users, I hope you all are going to download this fantastic add-on! The Google Base Feeder is located right here directly – http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=473

…and now for those of you who are using the Zen Cart Multi-Site, read on…

Ok this is NOT automated at all… but it works for SURE! Ok here is what I did step by step:

#1 I opened up a tab in zencart admin and went to Configuration – Google Base Feeder Configuration

Look at the 7th from the bottom items which is “Included Categories”. Click on it to edit it…

NOW I opened up a new tab in the admin and went to the CATALOG – Categories/Products area. Now you need to know your categories and for which domain they are located. For instance, best-radios-ever-in-the-world.com might be one of your sites and you know that you put all of your products for that site into the category called RADIOS. so look on this page and on the left most column you’ll see a number next to RADIOS.

copy this number… then head back to the other tab and…

PASTE this number into the already editable field for the INCLUDES CATEGORIES and choose update. by doing this when Google Base feeder runs, it will ONLY look at this category of products. The other important field to modify here is the “Output File Name” – click this and edit it to say “radios” then update. THIS will create the name of the feed dedicated to this domain.

NOW open up another tab in the admin and go to TOOLS – Google Base Feeder and click the “Create Product Feed” link [HERE] This will give you the standard pop up window… wait a bit and then it will indicate it is done.

Next step, go to FTP and find your FEED directory in the root of your zencart site and download radio_products.xml to your local computer. You’ll now need to clean up this file to be useable for Google Base/Merchant… you’ll want to copy paste replace the incorrect domain name into the feed… so if your default domain name for the admin site is www.mymasterdomain.com, then you’ll need to find it and replace all occurrences with www.best-radios-ever-in-the-world.com

BINGO! You are done. This file is NOW correct and ready for manual upload to Google Base. HOWEVER, you’ll also want to re-upload this back to the FEED folder via FTP and replace the wrong one. PLUS, once it is there you can reference it and schedule an auto upload from Google Base. The feed location would be: http://www.best-radios-ever-in-the-world.com/feed/radio_products.xml Also, you’ll need to setup individual Google Accounts to have separate Google Base Accounts for each domain name so don’t forget that either.

I am going to be working on a mod to make Google Base Feeder and Google Sitemaps work correctly with Zen Cart Multi-Site AND possibly add in a separate USER based admin to show ONLY that particular store’s information in the admin… sounds like a Zen Cart Multi-User Mall concept…

Zen Cart NING site.

reitz — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:11:18 +0000

Ok, so I finally set up a ning site for zen-cart. If you find the zencart forum to be rather large, crowded and intimidating then you might like this smaller more intimate setting in ning to ask all of your zen cart questions.

Zen Cart – a Zen Cart developer and fan. I am not on the zencart development team!.

Zen Cart 1.3.9 is coming very soon!

reitz — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 05:37:08 +0000

A “little bird” told me that Zen Cart 1.3.9 should be coming out VERY SOON! This will have all of the latest patches for zencart obviously but it will also add in some great updates! And some possible new foreshadowing of ideas that are coming with zencart 2.0! One area that should be coming is an update to attribute insertion! If this is added (I have heard that it will!), it will make adding attributes MUCH QUICKER FOLKS! And this should be a sign of things to come for Zen Cart 2.0 folks! I’ll update you on more Zen Cart news when I know more!

Zen Cart Directory Security Update

reitz — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:31:12 +0000

Hey folks. Just got word from the Zen Cart development team today and they are highly recommending removing several directories after you install your site! These directories are all in the root of the store. They include: /docs and /extras and OF COURSE /zc_install !!! In the past I had recommended simply just renaming these directories, BUT now due to some hacks that are occurring, it is better recommended to download these to your local computer then DELETE them from the root folder.

Also, if you are like most people and you don’t plan on offering digital downloads then you should ALSO delete: /download, /media and /pub

Full details are here at the zencart forum: November 28th Security Update for Zen Cart

ZenCart 1.3.8 and PHP 5.3

reitz — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:28:55 +0000

Have a Zen Cart 1.3.8 and your host is planning to move to PHP5.3 soon?

Better get the latest patch from the Zen Cart Development team! Download the ZenCart for PHP5.3 patch here folks!

PHP 5.3 Support – Zen Cart Support

reitz — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:37:18 +0000

The below comes from the man, the myth… Dr. Byte himself!

PHP 5.3 was released a few months ago, and along with it come many problems due to the PHP authors’ decisions to backport many PHP 6 features into 5.3 and deprecate several oft-required functions.

In so doing, they broke many things affecting Zen Cart operation in v1.3.8a and older.

We are preparing a patch which can be used by those whose hosts have upgraded (or have announced imminent plans to upgrade) to PHP 5.3.

We hope to post the patch here very soon. It’s in regression testing now.

When the patch is ready it will be announced here in the Announcements area.

via PHP 5.3 Support – Zen Cart Support.

Zen Cart 1.4 NOT being released!

reitz — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:19:44 +0000

Howdy folks. This announcement has been a long time a’comin’ but the zen cart developers have finally announced that zencart 1.4 will not ever come out. Does this mean the end of zen cart? Is the soon to be released 1.3.9 to be the summation, the culmination, the termination of all things zen cart?

Hmmm. well no. What it actually means is that Zen Cart 2.0 is coming out! The advancements put in place are revolutionary in scope. Latest versions of php and mysql are REQUIRED. ALL templates and plugins will need to be redesigned! ALL. This is a major redesign… kinda like going from Windows to a Mac. Everything is going to be different and radically faster. There are less queries to the database which means a massive increase in speed of pages rendering and a big decrease in load on mysql on the server.

I feel this is a massive announcement and quite bold. Add-ons will become plug and play like in WordPress. Less design work will be needed as a lot of this will be taken care of in the admin section. I personally hope this DOES lead to something elegant like the admin of a wordpress. It will be a radical change for people to learn it but it will be beautiful and fast and a needed revolution.

Stay tuned folks. I’ll be demoing the beta soon and will provide screencasts of these improvements and hopefully avoiding all of the bugs!

Site Redesign and New SEARCH TOOL

reitz — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 03:30:43 +0000

Howdy folks! Hope everyone is into the winter holiday season in full swing by now! I finally got around to redesigning my main site (zen cart) and the blog site (wordpress) to make them look a bit more uniform. It was just CSS changes though and some photoshop stuff. I mainly just made the content div tags transparent then added the main background a lightened robot with the magnifying glass. Way easier than I anticipated. And lastly, I added in a cross web app search tool in zen cart to search through the wordpress blog as well. This was pretty easy to set up as well. It is based on http://www.sphider.eu and is really cool. It requires a bit of programming to get it to run perfectly, but after that, it just rocks! I really like it as it takes all of the search results and puts it right into a defined page of zen cart. -Tom

Sample Zen Carts with Template Switcher

reitz — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 14:02:10 +0000

People are always asking me for samples of zen carts for look and feel, so I finally decided to assemble several of our favorites and included a nifty tool called Template Switcher on the left column that allows you to switch the look of the theme of the zen cart right before your eyes. It is pretty neat. Here is the link: Zen cart Sample Templates If you have any questions, please let us know! -Tom

“Don’t Use Google Analytics And Zen Cart If…”

reitz — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:36:27 +0000

One of my favorite Zen Cart mods – Google Analytics for Zen Cart is the absolute best solution for tagging all of your pages easily and rapidly. If you have an estore, be sure to go the full route and make sure the success page gets the correct tagging to send back to GA and link in to your ecommerce stats… this is vital folks! This allows you to be able to directly exactly which keywords generate how much MONEY! Once this is known, Zen Cart optimization is a cake walk!

“Is Google Analytics Really Needed For Zen Cart?”

reitz — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 03:44:36 +0000

How important is it to you to install Google Analytics into your Zen Cart??? Only the most important thing you could possibly do… Without it, you are completely blind to knowing what to do… what is your top landing page? What is your top exit page? What is your bounce rate? What are the trends for any of these? Which keyword search makes you the most money? These are just a few things… without this knowledge, you are wasting a LOT of time guessing what to do to your site… so many people come to me wanting to change their theme or their look of the current theme… and the first thing I ask is, “What is your bounce rate?” After a beat, and no answer… they realize that they have no idea what I am talking about… I had one client with a bounce rate of 19% who was wanting a website redesign, and I told her flat out NO… not needed, spend your money elsewhere (Folks, a 19% bounce rate is GREAT. This means that slightly less than 1 out of 5 of ALL VISITORS to her site, left immediately! This is great cause the industry average is 30 to 40%!)