My first ZenCart tip
The files
There’s a few files in your ZenCart installation that need to be edited. I found out which ones by trial-and-error, and by following some information found about Product Types on the ZenCart site. I quickly worked out the correct file combinations to get the desired result.
So, you want to go to your unzipped ZenCart files - I’m sure you’ve kept them on your hard drive, or on a disk somewhere. Open that sucker up, and edit the files with NotePad (or some other text editor - NO! Microsoft Word is NOT a text editor!). You need to find the following files:
- zencart/admin/includes/functions/general.php
- zencart/admin/includes/modules/update_product.php
- zencart/admin/includes/modules/product/collect_info.php
- zencart/admin/includes/modules/product/preview_info.php
- zencart/includes/modules/pages/product_info/ main_template_vars.php
- zencart/includes/temaples/YOUR TEMPLATE/templates/tpl_product_info_display.php
Open up each of these files - and before you do anything, append each filename with “OLD” and save it. (So “general.php” will become “generalOLD.php”.) This way, you have a backup of your good file configurations, and you can easily restore things if you need to.
Now, I basically did a “find” in each of these files - but don’t do this step yet in the “general.php” file - I think it’s the quickest method. So click at the first line of the file, and do a search for “products_description”. There will be several instances in each file. You want to copy every line you find, and paste the line directly beneath the original. Any instance of “products_description”, you want to add a “2″ to, so the second line becomes “products_description2″.
NOTE: this is case-sensitive. If you see any instances of “_PRODUCTS_DESCRIPTION” - which you will see several - leave them alone.
There will also be instances where you need to copy entire sections - not just a line or two. I’ll go over each file individually and show you what needs to be changed.



I can’t begin to tell you how wonderful this is. I’ve searched the Zen site over and over and nothing could touch what I needed. THANKS…. BUT…. The admin collect_info works, the preview_info works, but it’s not writing the input to the database. I opend php MyAdmin and verified the fields are correct. Also I verified the new records are writing to the database but the new fileds are blank. Additionally Both New records and Updated records are not writing to the new fields, AND I’m not getting any error messages. If I could beg your help, Can you point me to areas to look for possible mistakes or errors? I’m so close I can smell it…
Thanks a MILLION…
Spoken on March 6th, 2008 at 1:05 pm