How to customized your own template for Zen-cart shopping cart Open Source application

Published on January 30, 2008 in PHP. 3 Comments

This article is copied from the official zen-cart support web site.

Since Version 1.3.+ Zen Cart™ has moved away from its old table based layout to a CSS based layout.

CAPITALIZED words refer to a folder or language that you choose. We use CUSTOM for your template and ENGLISH for your language by default. Change these if needed.


Open includes/templates/ and create a new folder. You can call it anything you like, though it is best not to make it too long and to use underscores instead of spaces. We will call it /CUSTOM here, so everywhere we write /CUSTOM from now on, you should replace it with your own folder name.

Create an empty folder inside your new template directory and call it images so you should have includes/templates/CUSTOM/images/.

Next, copy the includes/templates/template_default/css directory and place the folder and its files in your new includes/templates/CUSTOM/ folder.

You can also create the following empty folders inside your new template directory:

/common
/sideboxes
/templates

Then you copy the file called includes/templates/template_default/template_info.php, and put it inside includes/templates/CUSTOM/. Next, open includes/templates/CUSTOM/template_info.php in your text editor. Change the information below between each set of single quotes to suit your new template. Remember to keep the single quotes. Your template name does not need to be identical to your folder name, and you can use spaces to make it read well, but it is best to make them similar. Leave the space between the quotes for the template screenshot field empty for now, since you don’t have one yet.

<?php
$template_name = ‘CUSTOM’;
$template_version = ‘Version 1.0′;
$template_author = ‘<enter your name here>’;
$template_description = ‘This is my own template, created for my site at
 includes
/templates
/CUSTOM

/common
/css
stylesheet.css
/images
/sideboxes
/templates
template_info.php

Upload your /CUSTOM folder to your server.

Open your Admin panel and navigate to tools -> template selection. Click the Edit button, then choose CUSTOM from the dropdown menu and click the Update button. Now, navigate to tools -> layout boxes controller and at the bottom of the page click the Reset button.

Your new template is now enabled and ready for you to customize.

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2 Responses to “How to customized your own template for Zen-cart shopping cart Open Source application”

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  • ashok
    June 23, 2008 at 9:55 am

    Hi
    good evening

    I am trying with zencart templates and i inserted template
    but i cant get that template in frontend

    So please give the information on that…..

    Thanking You,
    AShok

    [Reply]

    WebGuru replied on June 24th, 2008:

    did you upload the template folder to the /template directory? and did you log in to the back-end to select/enable this template?

    [Reply]

  • Ahmed
    June 30, 2009 at 8:24 am

    Dear i have read out your material over zen cart but i m afraid that you dint write clean information about zencart template customization or some thing which will help to make custom layout from xhtml to zencart template like as i m interested to design a shop i designed in my way or style and htmlized it with css now how would i integrate that html with zen cart to make my ideal shop in my way. i hope you understand and will definitely either refer or will do write some thing on it.

    I really appreciate your efforts which you are writing on your blog.

    [Reply]

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