Carol I went to that site you recommended above. Of course I'm already confused? I was reading the forum & they said you should use WYSIWYG which if I'm understanding correctly is a newer version of NVU?

Tried registering for their forum but all I get is a little red x where you have to see the authentication image to type in? Working on that. Nothing is simple, LOL

Just reading the forum was almost enough to send me back to bed. LOL They're talking about transferring sites & big time stuff that's all Greek to me.

WYSIWYG means What You See Is What You Get. That is what the Nvu regular pane IS and what you were talking about the eBay editor.

Just download Nvu and open it and play with it a little bit. I think you will like it. After you get something looking good in the WYSIWYG view, then you go to the HTML view to copy the code when you go to a listing site.

It's pretty easy for basic stuff like making a listing. You probably won't even need the forum unless you are doing more advanced stuff. In fact I've used that program for about 2 years and didn't even know they HAD a forum. I may go there so I can figure out CSS for my web site.

Carol

Carol, once again I guess I put the cart before the horse. You will probably understand all that forum talk. Woweeee they're changing colors, copying websites & all kinds of fancy stuff.

No wonder I get no where with my own site. I know nothing about CSS? Computers for Simply Stupid???? Hmmmmmm

Actually I don't know the CSS stuff. Gives me a headache every time I try to learn a bit of it. I'm OK on HTML, not great, but can get by.

The SS stands for Style Sheet. I forget what the C stands for.

But if a person figures it out, you make a page or 2 that have all the "rules" or "styles" for your site pages. Then if you need to change something, like add something to the nav bar, you only have to change that rule page instead of a hundred or more pages on your site.

Just take it slow and one step at a time. The WYSIWYG editor is pretty good and fairly easy to use.

Carol

FrontPorch

I can't tell which you are referencing but maybe I can help on Zen Cart a little....

CPanel has nothing to do with Zen, that's your Control Panel provided by your web host.

What you want to do is go into your Zen Cart Admin section, the 1st selection top left is Configuration, select My Store under the Configuration menu. Look at the list of items on the page that comes up....all the way at the bottom (should be 1 up from the bottom) you'll see HTML Editor, what does it say there? If it doesn't say HTMLAREA click the line and see if you can change the selection to HTMLAREA.

Now whenever you go to Catalog>Categories/Products you should see a box at the very top of the page where you can select Text Editor and you should be able to select HTMLarea and you'll see the familiar HTML Editor will appear in the Products Description area. You don't need to type in HTML code, it will do it for you

Don't go all the way to the Add Product page before changing to the HTML at the top as you can't do it on the Add Product page.

Hope that helps a bit!

knappschiles wrote (View Post): › The SS stands for Style Sheet. I forget what the C stands for.

The 'C' stands for 'cascading' which describes the way the "rules" for the styles are passed down to the elements on a page. The styles can either be defined in a separate file e.g style.css or defined on the actual HTML page itself. You can set universal rules in an external style sheet which can then be over ruled or added to on the page to be displayed, this is the 'cascading' bit.

It sounds more complicated than it is but once you start fiddling with them it should start making more sense. In ZenCart you will only need to adjust the CSS within your template. There are some things that can be changed safely such as the colours used though you will have to understand how RGB colour definitions are used to use it effectively. Google "web safe colors" before you change any though. There are other settings that can often be changed such as font, width, height, border etc though you have to be a little more careful with these as you can ruin the format of a page if you're too drastic with your edits.

As with everything else with computers, make a back up of any files you're going to edit so you can always revert back to the way it was previously if it all goes wrong.

The best way to learn is to experiment, as long as you have a backup you can't go wrong.

KT you are my hero. I knew there had to be a better way but never realized I had to change that configuration thingee. Geeeeeeez It was marked NONE (no wonder I had to try to type in all that dang html stuff).

I did a test & sure enough, I just hit the <> & magic, there's all the html.

Now am I thinking correctly that if I have the html for a template, I can just past it into the html version of the <> & when I hit the WYSIWYG version, I'll see my template? Or does the html for my template have to be special html to go into the zencart description box?

I am sooooooooo happy. Finally a solution. I may even go back to listing at my site, I'd about given up hope of ever learning html, LOL

Again KT thank you, thank you, thank you!

Update: Yes I can just paste in my template html & wallah, Magic. This is just toooooooo wonderful for words KT You made my week!

No problem, glad I could help! I see you found the answer to the pasting the HTML in, that also works the other way....you can create your HTML in Zen and hit the <> and copy it out also.

Have Fun!

Ted

Ted, today I attempted to put my border into my listing (made at TagBot). Then did the listing your magic way & went to validator. A godzillion errors. Apparently they don't like the html for TagBots border?

Sad because I love the border but guess now the search is on for a program that has html that zen likes (or validator?) To be honest I'm not clear exactly how important things looking errorless in validator is. Is that the final word?

The reason I do the validating is that when I check my Cpanel error log, I have 30 or more "listing can't be found" errors DAILY. I'm so confused because I've had folks buy from the site? I'm guess that cpanel error log is saying that my listings aren't being found by the spiders, like google, dmoz, etc? Or am I totally off track again.

Maybe I can't have a template or border in my description area of zen if I want the spiders to find me? Maybe I have to find a zen compatible template? Oh me, oh my, no rest for the weary

Have you thought about not using a template within a template? Just my opinion but using the template in the product description area is pushng the page way out and making viewers having to scroll sideways to see the whole page. Just an opinion.

There are a lot of plug in templates available, there's a demo page for those here: http://zencarttemplates.info/

When I looked with FireFox the CSS on your pages is validating and a lot of the errors are due to HTML mismatches and images that have been removed to customize the template. I don't know how much it will affect the spiders.....in the Zen Admin under the Tools menu there's a "Who's Online" selection, you could check that every now and then to see what spiders are crawling your site.

Like Carol said earlier, a good editor will help you a bunch and if there's any way you can get FireFox running you can actually use the Edit HTML to play with your present pages making small changes to see how they affect the CSS from the template without actually changing the page until you copy the changes to the actual stylesheet on your server.

KT you are so right. I never thought of it like that, that I'm trying to use a template within a template. I'll go remove the templates? Was thinking I could just copy the description part of my old listings & then reenter them without my messed up html & maybe that will fix them?

Have to run out today but later hopefully, I'm get to it. Thanks again

Do I still need that editor Carol suggested now that I know about the magic button on zen? Doesn't that do the editing for me automatically?

My next problem is trying to find out why when I copy the html for my pictures from photobucket they come out so big in my descriptions. Think I need thumbnails that people can click on if they want them bigger. No? I'm sure PB has a way to get thumbnails but I haven't found it.

For years I was using InkFrog that has the html for thumbnails but someone told me InkFrog was putting all kinds of advertising into my listings when people clicked to enlarge???? Never knew that!

If you need a program to make thumbs for you try this, it's free. http://www.fookes.com/ezthumbs/index.php?2.8

It will make them any size you want and will do a whole folder at once. You will then need to upload them to a host or your web site.

carol

You won't need the editor, it's built in to the cart.

Upload the pictures of the items directly on the product page where you see the browse button at the bottom of the description area. Zen will use the image in the thumbnail, product page and enlarged page "automagically" making the necessary size changes.

I wouldn't put the pictures in the description box, there's a way to show multiple images per product....there's a great tutorial in the Zen forums, do a search over there for calico_cat where one of the developers does a walk through on image naming.

I didn't answer your original question, sorry. Yes, you can just copy the text only from the description area...you can open 2 browsers and do that easily copying the text from one while viewing the product and pasting it into the description box on another browser open to the admin area.

Couple of Questions....do you have FTP access set up to your ZenCart? How many Products do you anticipate having in total when you're done?