If you are looking for a book/manual to help you understand Zen Cart better than I recommend Zen Cart – E-commerce Application Development by Suhreed Sarkar. Zen Cart has alot of options and little bells and whistles and no matter what level of webmaster you are, it can be difficult to use, maintian, and develop. This manual will help answer many important questions you will have with your Zen Cart store. I have purchased a Zen Cart manual before, but this one is much better than the one I used previously. Here’s what book covers:

Installing & Basic Configuration of Zen Cart

Installing is one thing, but the basic configurations are another. Many developers, including myself have bypassed many of the basic configurations Zen Cart offers simply due to ignorance. You also learn exactly what Zen Cart has and can do right off the bat so you know what you are getting yourself into from the start.

Customize Look and Feel

In these chapters you get to understand the template file structure. You’ll learn how to create and customize your own new templates in Zen Cart. Suhreed’s simple instructions help clarify alot of issues designers have in making Zen Cart ecommerce stores look better. The biggest knock on Zen Cart has less to do with functionality, and more to do with usability and design. Suhreed helps clarify a few solutions that help your Zen Cart store look as good as any other.

Localization of Zen Cart

Many of you want to have a shopping cart that is available in many different languages, but just don’t know how to make that possible. Suhreed covers the topics of multiple languages, tax zones and many others so that you can sell your products to the world. In 15 minutes of reading I learned a heck of alot about what Zen Cart can do with multiple languages. It helped me gain a better respect for Zen Cart’s already created functions.

Migration from OS Commerce

Suhreed helps layout the specifics when it comes to migrating from an old OS Commerce web store over to your new Zen Cart one. This is a very common task that many people do and a very important one. Since Zen Cart is an advanced version of OS Commerce, you may find yourself wanting to do an upgrade yourself. Suhreed will show you how.

Maintenance & Troubleshooting

I have talked with many people who have spent hours and hours trying to troubleshoot a simple issue with Zen Cart. I myself have spent hours of my own time trying to find answers or solutions with no luck. For example, one evening I spent 4 hours trying to figure out how to allow customers to make purchases without having to create an account! Only to find out that by default, Zen Cart only allows customers to make purchases with an account, and that I needed a custom plugin to enable purchasing without an account! At the time I wish I had a good manual that could help me save those 4 hours. If only I had this manual back then. 

Integrate with other CMS’s

Last but not least perhaps the best chapter of this manual. I have not seen another Zen Cart author cover this in any other book. I also have not seen too much documentation of this on the web anywhere. Suhreed helps you learn how to easily integrate your Zen Cart ecommerce store with a Wordpress and/or Drupal content management system. Instead of wasting your time setting up some kind of shopping cart plugin, just integrate a full on Zen Cart store right into your site. For me this is the highlight of this book!!

Go get a copy of the book yourself if you are using Zen Cart. It’s currently listed at $45 at Packt Publishing. Follow the link also to learn more about the product from the author himself.