With every version of Zen Cart I get to trim my template down. Many of my Zen Cart complaints have been fixed or reconfigured to my satisfaction. Don’t know how much I’ve had to do with that but it’s definitely satisfying to see these changes.

With Zen Cart 2.0.1 I have turned my attention to updating my base template. I am now featuring a template with no side columns, but in order to do that I had to create some new header boxes and new dropdowns for the categories and the header navigation menu. This brings the template into more conformity (sigh) to so many websites – especially those that use Shopify. Folks are now so used to that base configuration that they think anything else is just done wrong. That’s quite irritating to me but I’m also seeing so many websites and apps using hash menus (navigational dropdowns) that hopefully the hash menu is not longer an impediment for the user. Since a visitor can find it on the left or right, it still is a bit of an issue. I chose to put it on the right in order to highlight the categories drop down. I also have had the option for years to include the information and ez-page sidebox links in the menu, headed in red.

That categories dropdown is driven by CSS and a bit of jquery  and is based on the Category CSS fly out menu that has never been completely satisfactory because of its mousing sensitivity. The biggest advantage of it was always the ability to show all the categories and sub categories so now you get that feature in a sliding / accordion style dropdown. To say the least, I’m thrilled at how it turned out! I can promise you this improvement is a game changer for Zen Cart. I will not be offering it for free but may well package it as a add-on for sale in the future. In the meantime, it’s only available with my template. (It is not Zen Cart version dependent, by the way.)

These new dropdowns replace the old mobile version navigation for a more streamlined version that requires very few changes from full size to phone size.

So yes, I do have a demo site and yes, you can look at it. I have other features planned for the product information page but here’s the link: https://200.deliatest.com/

Don’t forget that the template switcher is still available at https://deliatest.com/readytogo. That site’s main benefit is being able to view what can be done with different colors and images. Eventually I hope to have it all incorporated into the new 200 site as well.

It’s hard to feature a good range of website themes in that switcher, so please take a look at the past responsive websites in the portfolio.

As soon as the product information page changes are done, I’ll post another article about that.