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So, I’m going to offer up my first ZenCart tip – it’s something I learned yesterday.

I’ve done a few ZenCart installations/customizations in the last year. Thank God, the more I do it, the better I get. ZenCart can be daunting the first time you tackle it. I have ideas on how to make it better, but I don’t think there’s many of the experts out there who would agree with my methods. BUT – I will say that they work for me.

So, out of all of the ZenCart installations I’ve done, there’s one recurring theme that seems to be happening: the need for extra fields. Namely, the need for a secondary “description” field for each product. Every client I’ve ever had has needed this capability. Up to now, I’ve managed to do what they desire with creative CSS code – and I mean creative. I pride myself on my clean, semantic code – but the need for what some of these people want forces me to revert to some really interesting, “out of the box” thinking (aka, reverting back to 1997 on some occasions, and completely ignoring some browsers on others.)

In every instance, it would have been really great if I could have just one more field for my description.

And now, I’ve figured it out!

Yes, I’m sure that the ZenCart gurus will say “Duh!” upon seeing this tutorial. But when I was looking for a solution to this, I found very few answers. In fact, when I posed the question the other day, the initial response was “Why would you want to do that?” Not until I fully explained the need did I finally get one person who agreed that an extra field would be the best solution for my problem. (I also found others asking for the same capability – not necessarily for descriptions, but just an extra field, period – with threads going back some time and no solution.)

Yes, using different product types would work – but the ones they offer are for stuff like “books” and “music”, and have specific fields set out for them – so you’d have to edit the code anyway to make it fit your needs. Plus, when you have a client who isn’t so savvy on the web stuff, placing things like “yarn” into the “music” category can make things slightly confusing. Personally, I just wanted an extra field in the default “products” category, and be done with it.

I was successful. And it works like a charm. Granted, it takes some extra effort, and if I knew how to write the code to automate it better, then I would, and offer it up as a contribution. But I don’t – so you’re getting the manual method. Suck it up! (As my dad would say – “It’ll put hair on your chest!”)