Brackett Design & Strategic Marketing » Zen Cart

Nexugen Skin Care Products

John Brackett — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:15:12 +0000

Nexugen.com is an ecommerce store that features natural anti-aging skin care products. The store is built with Zen-Cart, and is wrapped in Word Press, which I configured as a content management system. A central homepage mixes elements from Word Press and from Zen-Cart. The customer can easily navigate either to a blog to read articles about skin care products, or they can go to the store to shop.

This site encompasses several features for natural search optimization including dozens of relevant articles that are keyword centric, various modules to support meta-tagging and keyword featuring tools to attract search engine spiders.

This configuration has proven to be immensely more successful than the old site in terms of SEO and customer experience. Since I launched it in November 2007, sales has steadily increased, as well has natural search terms list ranking.

Technology: WordPress (used as CMS). Zen-Cart. Various modules and extensions added as well.

Zen Cart Blank Checkout Page Error- Solved!

John Brackett — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:55:02 +0000

I was recently preparing the launch of a new Zen Cart store for a client when encountered a blank page on checkout. There was no error, just a blank page. Baffled, I reloaded the CHECKOUT page and processed another test transaction only to see the blank page appear farther up the checkout process on the CART page.

The admin showed the orders were being processed, so the data was hitting the database. I had no where to go, and was looking at either systematically going through each template file and each database table to see if I could find any evidence of what was causing the errors.

The more I thought about doing this the reality of the tedious hours it would take to just find it began to sink in. I did research and found other developers that had encountered this issue, but none seemed to offer any clear path that would fix my issue. Basically they were even more lost than I was on the blank page horror.

Finally I found the Zen Cart Error-Logging Utility. This little app saved the day and boosted my confidence for future Zen Cart installs. First, the download page explains that the blank page effect is the result of PHP syntax errors. This can happen by tinkering around in the template files and mistyping an operator. Ok, that sounded good. However, I had purposely set my customizations from the admin just for this reason.

Apparently Zen Cart version 1.3.8 has this bug. It’s recommended to upgrade to 1.3.8a, which I had already done. I was still getting the error.

I proceeded to download and install the Debugging Tool per their instructions.

I ran the transaction again and returned this error in the log file

[04-Apr-2008 13:34:22] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/broadcas/public_html/catalog/includes/languages/ english.php:1401) in/home/broadcas/public_html/catalog/includes/init_includes/ init_templates.php on line 78

[04-Apr-2008 13:34:22] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/broadcas/public_html/catalog/includes/languages/ english.php:1401) in /home/broadcas/public_html/catalog/includes/functions/ functions_general.php on line 44\

I replaced these files and thought I got it working until the confirmation page came up blank. After more research I discovered that functions_general.php is not the correct file to swap, it’s english.php in the languages file. At this point I just uploaded the whole damn languages folder from a fresh download of Zen Cart 1.3.8a. Boom! it all worked. It tested and retested with no errors.

If you run into this issue, or any other Zen Cart weirdness, please download this file. It will save tons of time and frustration, when you need to squash little pain-in-the-ass bugs like this.

BroadcastSolutions.com

John Brackett — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:50:09 +0000

URL: www.broadcastsolutions.com

Broadcastsolutions.com is a broker of professional video production and post production equipment. The site is built on WordPress as it’s primary framework. I integrated the Zen-Cart E-Commerce system into the mix to create a seemless solution that enables them to generate a lead and follow up with it offline.

I built their original site in 1995, which served their purpose even though it was dated and missed the latest technologies that would benefit their business. When the owners Rick and Teresa contacted me about revamping the site a couple of months ago, I was astonished to see that they were still using the old site, frames and all.

Even though the old site was working for them, it desperately needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. the current site could not display images of the equipment they were selling, the admin was clunky, and they were not ranking for any of their primary keywords. I won’t even go into the whole thing with frames. Hey! it was 1995, frames were in back then.

This made it a perfect fit for my WordPress and Zen-Cart combination. They loved the idea and the samples I showed from nexugen.com and georgetemerson.com. The blog was pretty standard issue, it only required a custom homepage. I did create a custom header with a nice CSS navigation bar that maximizes their keyword text in header, and is very user friendly.

I made strong use of the All-In-One-SEO wordpress plugin to set the site up for what will hopefully be a quick rise for their primary keyword rankings. With a domain that is over 10 years old, I have to think that they can get ranked once some basic optimizing techniques are applied. In this case I’ve got them on a course of content creation that should stock their blog with quality content in just a few months.

The store required much more customization because they don’t directly take orders from the site. The requirement was for a “catalog” only interface that would mail equipment requests, which would be followed up and transacted over the phone between Rick or Teresa and the client.

I was able to accomplish most of this through the standard Zen Cart admin. The rest was done through gentle tweeks to the core code. Zen Cart can be very finicky, I’ve come to learn, so I’m not a fan of tinkering too much under hood except when there is no other choice. Ultimately I turned off the all of the payment and shipping module admin settings, leaving only the Check/Money order function live.

In the individual product listing I tried various combinations of the shipping options until I found one that removed the shipping feature by configuring the product “Virtual” which removed the shipping options and form inputs for shipping address information.

The result is that their specific needs are met, yet if they want to start taking online payments in the future, we can transition to that method quickly and efficiently.

It was on the development of Zen Cart for this store that I experienced the nightmare “Blank Zen Cart Checkout Page” error for the first time. I’ve explained how I dealt with it another post. If you are attempting custom Zen Cart work, I highly suggest reading it.

The entire project took about 6 weeks to complete. The site in now officially launched with over 200 products, featuring pictures, blog articles, and no frames.