Recently we were got a website consulting gig to help redesign a Zen Cart store and optimize the website for search engines. It turns out that Zen Cart is not as difficult as we expected it to be. It is just like any other CMS really. There are some install files, some templates, and it also has a bunch of plugins available as well. The project did not start and end how we had planned, but it ended up being a great learning experience for both my Drupal development and future Zen Cart development projects.

At first we tried to take this project on and develop it within Drupal, but that didn't work out too well. It turns out the Drupal module that we were using, Drupal Zen Cart Integration, was still in development and some features we needed were not available yet. The store would have worked out just perfectly in Drupal aside from the fact that it was a clothing store and people had to choose their size. My particular Drupal module development knowledge is not as far as what was needed to add that functionality, but I do intend on contacting and hopefully working with the developer of the Drupal Zen Cart module to get this functionality added to a later release. So, this is our first Zen Cart design project and probably not the last.

Here is the final result of our redesign.

All of our other personal Drupal development projects are available on our homepage in the sidebar.