Zen Cart Document and Article Manager

Document and Article Manager allows you to easily display various types of documents in your Zen Cart™ without having to manually edit a page or sidebox for each new document.

Relevance: Zen Cart™ 1.3.0 and forward

Cost: $35 Buy Now!

Support Thread: My commercial software is not supported on the Zen Cart forum. Please email me questions instead.

See it Live: Go to my demo shop and see it in action.

Overview:

If you have a bunch of documents - MS Word files, Power Point Presentations, Excel Spreadsheets, PDFs and the like - that you are adding manually, one by one, to your site, then this mod is for you. Instead of updating an EZ page or a defined page, or perhaps the More Information sidebox every time you add a file to create a link, use the Document and Article Manager, and automate this process. Document and Article Manager creates a page called "Articles" which is automatically populated with the contents of an articles directory on your site. Files are listed in alphabetical order, and each file has an icon that indicates its filetype. Most popular filetypes are supported.






Here's what the whole screen looks like:







New articles which are transferred to your articles directory show up automatically; articles which are removed from the directory disappear from this page next time a customer loads it. You can maintain an article repository in your cart with no HTML or PHP programming.

The most common file formats (doc, pdf, ppt, txt and xls) are supported, as well as aiff, ai, bz2, chm, conf, c, cpp, css, deb, divx, file, gif, gz, hlp, html, htm, iso, jpeg, jpg, js, mov, mp3, mpg, odc, odf, odg, odi, odp, ods, odt, ogg, php, pl, png, ps, py, ram, rar, rb, rm, rpm, rtf, swf, sxc, sxd, sxi, sxw, tar, tex, tgz, vcf, wav, wma, wmv, xml, xpi, xvid, and zip.

Here they are with their associated icons:


The "Articles" link comes pre-integrated with the "Information" and "More Information" sideboxes, as well as the Site Map. Of course you are free to place the link elsewhere, such as in your header or footer if you prefer.

Naming your files: if you prefer to not have embedded spaces in your filenames, you may use underscores between words, and these will be stripped out in the anchor text (the link file name). For instance, both "Final Financial Results.xls" and "Final_Financial_Results.xls" will be displayed as "Final Financial Results" with an Excel icon.

Presentation options include:

1. The ability to show the filetype extension (hidden by default)
   
   
   • Final Financial Results.xls  
   
   
2. The ability to indicate filetype extension parenthetically (not shown by default)
   
   
   • Final Financial Results (XLS)  
   
   
3. The ability to hide the icon (icon is shown by default)
   
   
   • Final Financial Results  
   
   

These options are independantly controllable.

Have a lot of documents? You can organize them into subfolders.




As you descend into your subfolders, a breadcrumb trail shows the way back.




Installation is a breeze: most of the files are new files, not modifications. The only existing files you need to modify are the template files that link in the Articles page (typically a sidebox and the Site Map). No SQL; no core file modifications.

I charge a fee of $35 for Zen Cart Article Manager. Five dollars of this fee goes to the creator of the icons, Andi Gohr. The fee covers software only; installation is extra if you require help.

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