How do I install Zen Cart and what should I know about it?
Zen Cart truly is the art of e-commerce; a free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart system. The software is being developed by group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think e-commerce could be and should be done differently.
If you have used OsCommerce, Zen cart will be extremely familiar as it is based on OsCommerce with many of the contributions already added in and numerous other improvements.
Rather than having the standard Paypal payment module, Zen Cart will install the Paypal IPN with the click of a button. You will need to enable the IPN at Paypal and may test it in their sandbox by signing up at http://developer.paypal.com and reading the manuals there.
It does also support other payment gateways including 2Checkout.com.
Click on "New Installation".
Enter the following info:
Install on domain: select a domain or subdomain from the drop-down list
Install in directory: Leave empty to install in the root directory of the domain (access example: http://domain/).
Enter only the directory name to install in a directory (for http://domain/name/ enter "name" only without the quotes). This directory SHOULD NOT exist, it will be automatically created!
Admin access data
Administrator-username: enter a username to access the cart admin area
Password: enter a secure admin password (It should not contain full words, should contain letters and numbers, for better security it should contain capitals and lowercase.
Base configuration
Site name: enter the name for your site
Admin e-mail: your email address
Click on the Install Zen Cart button.
Click on the Finish Installation button.
When you first browse the cart, you will see the same access error in red across the top that you would see in OsCommerce on our system. To remove it, you will need to change permissions on /includes/configure.php and /admin/includes/configure.php to 444. While there, you should change the permissions on any subfolder under the Zen folder from 777 to 755.
