Zen Cart Tutorial and Installation How To

This tutorial describes how to use the Zen Cart shopping cart software with your NEXCESS.NET web hosting account. NEXCESS.NET specializes in hosting Zen Cart shopping carts and this tutorial is meant to help you quickly setup your Zen Cart with our web hosting service.

Zen Cart is open source, which means you can change it if you'd like apart from removing the author's copyright information or selling it to a third party.

For the sake of this tutorial we'll assume that you own the domain 'johnsmith.com' and are setting up an Zen Cart shopping cart at http://johnsmith.com/shop/.

Follow these steps to complete the tutorial:

1. The first thing to do is to run through the SiteWorx MySQL tutorial and create a database for X-Cart to use to store the information it needs.

   Create a database called 'zencart' with a user named 'zencart'. When you do this SiteWorx will prefix the database and user names with some text resembling your domain name.

   With our example domain of 'johnsmith.com' the database name is 'johnsmit_zencart' and the username is the same 'johnsmit_zencart'.
2. Download the latest version of Zen Cart from the Zen Cart website. Unzip the contents of the zip file to your desktop using http://winzip.com. At this point you should have a folder called 'zen-cart-v1.2.0d' that contains all the files and folders necessary to install on run your Zen Cart shopping cart. Rename the 'zen-cart-v1.2.0d' folder to 'shop'.
3. Upload the 'shop' directory to your 'html' directory in your web hosting account. You should do this via FTP and there are FTP tutorials on our tutorials page if you need help doing that.
4. Once the files and folders are finished uploading, you can access the installation wizard by opening your browser and pointing to 'http://www.johnsmith.com/shop/zc_install/'. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Continue' button to continue. You should now be on the GNU General Public License screen. Click that you agree to abide by the license. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Continue' button to continue. You should now be on the system check page. You should see several warnings on this page. Your screen should look like this:

   

   The following are the steps you need to take to fix each error:

   • Rename the 'dist-configure.php' file in the 'includes' folder to 'configure.php'
   • Rename the 'dist-configure.php' file in the 'admin/includes' folder to 'configure.php'

   Once you've renamed those files, you need to change the permissions on some files and folders in order for the script to access them properly. You can do this using the CHMOD command in your FTP program. If you don't know how to do this, check out the FTP tutorials on our tutorials page. Change the permissions on the files and folders as follows:

   • CHMOD the 'includes/configure.php' file to 666
   • CHMOD the 'admin/includes/configure.php' file to 666
   • CHMOD the 'cache' folder to 777
   • CHMOD the 'images' folder to 777
   • CHMOD the 'includes/languages/english/html_includes' folder to 777
   • CHMOD the 'pub' folder to 777
   • CHMOD the 'admin/backups' folder to 777
   • CHMOD the 'admin/images/graphs' folder to 777

   Once you've changed the permissions on those files and folder, click the 'Re-Check' button at the bottom of the system check page. You should now see that all of the errors have gone away except for the 'Register Globals' warning, which you can safely ignore. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Install' button at the bottom of the page to continue. You should now be on the path page. The path settings should be correct. You can ignore the Secure paths for this tutorial and keep the secure options at the bottom set to no. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Save System Settings' button to continue. The script will ask you if you want to use phpBB forums. For this example, we'll leave it set to no. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Save phpBB settings' button to continue. You should now be on the database settings page. You need to enter the information for the database you created in step #1. For this example, we'll enter the information as follows:

   • Database Username: johnsmit_zencart
   • Database Password: mypassword
   • Database Name: johnsmit_zencart
   • SQL Cache Method: You can choose whatever method you'd like. For this example, we'll choose Database

   You can leave the cache path set as it is. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Save Database Settings' button to continue. You will now need to fill in the settings for your store. You can fill these in according to your preference. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Save Store Settings' button to continue. You now need to create an admin account. You will use this account to manage your Zen Cart store. Fill out the fields according to your preference. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Save Admin Settings' button to continue. Your Zen Cart installation is now complete. You screen should look like this:

   

   There are a couple steps you need to take for security reasons. First, CHMOD the 'includes/configure.php' and 'admin/includes/configure.php' files back to 644. Next, delete the 'zc_install' folder from your web hosting account.

   Once those steps are finished, click on the 'Click here to open the admin area' button to continue. Enter the username and password for the admin account you created. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Login' button to continue. You should now be logged into the admin control panel for your Zen Cart. Your screen should look like this:

   

   From here you can manage your Zen Cart shopping cart system as you see fit. Your Zen Cart web hosting tutorial is now complete!

   For more information on how to use Zen Cart once it's installed, check out the Zen Cart FAQs.

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