Zen Cart™ fileset upload

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In our previous entry, choosing the right FTP will figure in the next step you’ll be going through to get your Zen Shopping Cart up. What may keep you from uploading FTP files onto your webserver may be the long file names of your cart settings. 

Let’s say that your FTP software is just the right one, upload your files through FTP on to your directory in the web host server. Keep file name preferences simple and easily remembered. Building up your directory is easier if you know what file went where.

File preference by most web hosts aren’t shown in public, then again there are some files that your client can have access to. Such as the link to your landing page from your e-mail:

/Home/MYPRODUCT/landingpage_html

Or some document files about your store

/var/www/YOURSTORE/httpdocs

Or even about user account information

/user/accounts/a/YOURNAME/httpd.

Notice the last string of letters for every file path? These are where all your shopping cart’s content is served from in short the webroot. The suffixes “html” “httpdocs” and “httpd” or sometimes “wwwroot” folder are common file names for your webroot. 

A shopping cart’s webroot is where all ZenCart files, site images and coded content must be found under this folder. When checking you uploaded cart software and a page 404’s then most often your content is not found because it isn’t where it is supposed to be.

Once you’ve uploaded your FTP files to your web host server, you would need to create (2) files. One file identifies the settings of your server while the other contains the location of the FTP files you’ve recently uploaded. Don’t forget to change the access permissions to these files, through your FTP change these permissions with the use of the chmod feature:

Right click on directory or file name opens to a menu under ‘properties’ gives this option. 

Once this is done, you can go to your server to rename configure files and change permissions to read-write-execute for all.

Locate file: /catalog/includes/dist-configure.php rename to configure.php and proceed to change permissions to 777 (read-write-execute for all).

Locate the 2nd file: /catalog/admin/includes/dist-configure.php rename to configure.php and proceed to change permissions to 777 (read-write-execute for all).

The difference of both files renamed configure.php is the first file are your cart’s inclusions and the second is the admin inclusion.

Owning a shopping cart site calls for indepth involvement, the ZenCart is one of the easiest to master in osCommerce programs. When in doubt contact your customer support for your domain.