Author: Michael
Date: October 22, 2008 at 10:42 pm

When I first started looking at Zen Cart templates, I approached the task from the perspective of creating a WordPress theme.  The Zen Cart template documentation, such as it is, does a good job of explaining the directory layout to use for a custom template, but it doesn’t actually explain what PHP functions can be used in template files.

I started looking for documentation on Zen Cart “template tags” and became frustrated by the fact that there isn’t really any such documentation.  I then decided to go about documenting the Zen Cart template functions myself.  It turns out, that’s actually not the best approach.

After speaking with some members of the Zen Cart development team, I realized that far fewer modifications are required to create a Zen Cart template as compared to a WordPress theme.  This is because most of the components of a Zen Cart site are configured via the Zen Cart administrative interface.  It’s not necessary to remove unwanted sections from the template PHP code.  They can simply be toggled off in the administration interface.

This is a very different strategy from WordPress theme creation, where a new theme is created from scratch, or at least from a very minimal template, and only those components that are desired are included in the code.

I was concerned that using the Zen Cart approach of leaving the individual page template files alone would limit my ability to customize the appearance, but that has not been a problem.  Even with restricting my customizations to the tpl_footer.php, tpl_header.php, and tpl_main_page.php files I have been able to customize the template sufficiently to fit into the required site design.

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Categories: web development