Well, I haven't caught his name yet, but I found a fellow "give something back" person who has provided me with some great information. Because if his assistance, I wanted to offer up a small amount to him via a link. So if you're looking for more WordPress and ZenCart stuff, and can't find it here (which is very possible, as I'm pretty small right now!), then feel free to look at the goodies "andrabr" has to serve up. There's a lot of goodness over there, and I'm getting ready to dive in. I found him via this conversation on integrating WordPress with ZenCart. Very nice. I also wanted to share a nice little plugin I wrote tonight. It's probably my first "official" one, and I'm sure it needs to be cleaned up. I'll probably play with it more. Anyway, someone on one of the lists I'm on is trying to get a dynamic stylesheet to work with WordPress. She has a client who needs a different background image to show up depending on what page you're on. Normally, you'd simply accomplish something like this just by using typical WP stuff: <php if(is_page('1')) { ?> do stuff for page ID #1 <?php } ?> However, the client needs to maintain themselves, and if they ever add or delete a page in the future, they would have no idea how to edit the code to get the new background to show up. (Or, if they did, they'd probably screw it up - or many other things could happen.) So she needed it to be as dynamic as possible. In a perfect world, the client would create a page, add in content, and upload an image (with the same name as the page), and it would be done. Happily enough, I figured it out!

Now, in my last post, I had said that if I could figure out how to edit Easy Populate to accept and distribute my extra description fields, I would be golden. Well, call me "the Golden Child". I did it. Now I will share with you how I did it so you may gleam with me.

So, I'm going to offer up my first ZenCart tip - it's something I learned yesterday. I've done a few ZenCart installations/customizations in the last year. Thank God, the more I do it, the better I get. ZenCart can be daunting the first time you tackle it. I have ideas on how to make it better, but I don't think there's many of the experts out there who would agree with my methods. BUT - I will say that they work for me. So, out of all of the ZenCart installations I've done, there's one recurring theme that seems to be happening: the need for extra fields. Namely, the need for a secondary "description" field for each product. Every client I've ever had has needed this capability. Up to now, I've managed to do what they desire with creative CSS code - and I mean creative. I pride myself on my clean, semantic code - but the need for what some of these people want forces me to revert to some really interesting, "out of the box" thinking (aka, reverting back to 1997 on some occasions, and completely ignoring some browsers on others.) In every instance, it would have been really great if I could have just one more field for my description. And now, I've figured it out!

Now, for the record, I know I don't talk about ZenCart on this site much....actually, I believe this is the first time I've mentioned it. It's been my plan, ever since this site's conception, to eventually put in the things I learn about ZenCart. One of the companies who use me as a subcontractor loves ZenCart, and I've found myself customizing that little doohickey more often than I ever thought I would. My inital contact with ZenCart was, to say the least, a nightmare. As a person who fully supports web standards and tableless design, I wanted to shoot myself. ZenCart came "totally tabled" and not very clean, either. You had to hack core files to get what you wanted, and I hacked a lot of core files. There were times when I just wanted to kill my computer - it was very frustrating. It got done, though, and it turned out to be lovely. But the creators of ZenCart have greatly improved - by leaps and bounds, actually. My first experience with ZenCart was only last year. Over that span of time, they have moved forward so quickly, it's almost unbelievable. Now, you can get it completely tableless (well, almost completely) and they've created a "template override" system so you don't have to hack the core code anymore. I've been coding another ZenCart site - it's about to go live - and it's absolutely beautiful. The site is a photographer's site, and she wanted something that - by the stuff you read in the forums - was utterly impossible. The photographer was sorely disappointed, because when she went to trade shows, this was her best-selling item. What she wanted was to sell by an attribute - but ZenCart doesn't really allow for that. But someone came along to save the day.