Cartage Menu Items

The Cartage component uses various methods to ensure that you end up on the correct page based on what you clicked on.

In version 2.0, we also introduced a new, enhanced menu item creation, to allow both SEF URLs and easier access to Zen Cart™ products/categories. It does this by re-writing the parameters given to it into a Zen Cart™ URL string.

There are 5 menu item types:

• Default
• Shopping Cart
• Account
• Login
• Logoff

All 5 use the same parameters, and I'll explain what each field is for, using real world examples. The parameters correspond to Zen Cart GET values, and they are:

Main Page

The main page value. Defaults to product_info

cPath

The category id. Defaults to null.

Manufacturers ID

The manufacturers id. Defaults to null.

Product ID

The ID of the product. Defaults to null.

Product Refresh

Should Joomla! refresh everytime the products ID is different in Zen Cart™? Defaults to no.

Show a Product

Assume that we've just created a new product (bluetooth headset, id of 14) in the category headsets (id of 3).

Now, we want to have a menu link to this item in our Headsets Joomla! menu, with the title 'Best for Gaming', with a URL of http://www.mystore.com/the-best-gaming-headset.html

• In our Headsets menu, create a new menu item (Menus --> Headsets --> New), and select the Cartage --> Default option.
• Set the title to 'Best for Gaming', and set the alias to 'the-best-gaming-headset' (Joomla! automatically adds the suffix of .html).
• In the Parameters - Basic, leave the Main Page value as 'product_info' and in the Product ID field put 14, the id for the headset.
• Optionally, you can also add in the Category ID into the cPath field. Set the value to be 3. This will affect the best-sellers sidebox, which is category sensitive. From a users point of view, it will make little difference as they will still see the product they clicked on, but cross-selling is important.
• Leave the other fields as their default.

This has now created a Joomla! menu item with the title "Best for Gaming", which when clicked will show go to the URL http://www.mystore.com/the-best-gaming-headset.html, and display the Zen Cart product bluetooth headset. If were to use Zen Cart™ without any SEF modules, this page would correspond to index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=3&products_id=14.

Showing a Non-Standard Product

By this I mean one that uses a different template. Assuming that you're familiar with how to do this, we'll assume the above example uses a custom product called headset. This is displayed by using the main_page value of product_headset_info in your standard Zen Cart™ store.

Assuming that the above Product ID and Category ID are unchanged, then use the above list, changing product_info to be product_headset_info.

Show an entire category

Normally the Cartage Module can be used to show the Categories in your Zen Cart™ store. If you don't wish to purchase this modules (it has many other uses) or you wish to highlight a category in a menu item.

A standard Zen Cart™ URL is index.php?main_page=index&cPath=3 (continuing our headsets theme). To create this using a Cartage menu item, select Cartage --> Default and:

• Set the Main Page value to index (note: not the default product_info)
• Set the cPath value to 3
• Leave the rest as default.

And the job is done.

Show the customers account

This is useful, as with one link you can provide both Account Information and a Login menu item. The simplest way is to select the Cartage --> Account menu item. This is the same as using Cartage --> Default --> Main Page = account, or the Zen Cart™ URL index.php?main_page=account