Portfolio

The sites below are all powered by the Zen Cart e-commerce application. As a whole, they are indicative of how Zen Cart can be tailored to meet specific business needs, and how readily the 'look and feel' can be customized via the template system. Most of them include some custom functionality that was specifically developed for the particular site.

www.clamdiggin.com	I did a lot of work on clamdiggin in 2005, starting with an upgrade of Zen Cart from an early beta version. There is a lot of custom functionality on this site, mostly dealing with the Flash slideshows that are generated on the fly by the cart. Extra data fields were added to the database and product edit pages to identify which products were to be included in the slideshows, and also which products were 'unique' works of art that are handled differently from simple out-of-stock items. The site uses a fairly minimalist theme which melds well with the environmentalism of the owners.
www.quango.com	Bruno Guez of Quango Music Group asked me to develop a template that would seamlessly integrate Zen Cart into his existing site, the front end of which is updated via a content management system.
www.jerusalembaskets.com	The Jerusalem Baskets site provided some interesting challenges, as the owners initially wanted the cart set up to ship products only within Israel, with flat rates established for various cities. That necessitated modifying the way the zones system works within Zen Cart before starting to modify a shipping module to meet the requirement. Although not yet implemented on their site, I also developed a 'parallel' shipping process within the checkout framework to accommodate a future expansion of their shipping needs to be on an international basis. Other unique features of this site from a store owner's perspective are the ability to designate Featured Categories rather than Featured Products, and a new 'Shop by Price' sidebox to display product lists based on a price range.
www.thevisualchurch.com	My work for The Visual Church site was also commissioned by Aaron Sagray of Feverish. I was given a proposed design layout and asked to develop a Zen Cart template to match it. The site does have a fairly unique theme, and the design works well for the site. The unique feature built into this cart is the ability for video clips to be easily attached to a product by the site owner: he just adds a video in exactly the same way that an image is added to a product and the template does the rest.
www.uninterruptiblesolutions.com	My involvement with Uninterruptible Solutions was initially limited to development of a new template and an upgrade of Zen Cart. Following completion of that work, Chris Ewert, the site owner, asked me to help him solve what had been a major headache for him regarding shipping modules. The source of the problem was his products - large capacity uninterruptible power supplies generally don't ship in a single carton because they usually include a number of large batteries. In order to generate accurate real-time shipping quotes from either FedEx or UPS, he needed a way for the cart to know exactly how many cartons the order would comprise, exactly how much each individual carton weighed, and if in fact one product could fit in the same carton as another. That problem was resolved by modifying the way the product weight is entered on the product entry page, and adding an extra database field to indicate if the product could share the same carton as another or not. Once that was done, it wasn't difficult to modify a standard UPS module so that it could retrieve accurate real-time quotes from the UPS server. Some of his really large units cannot be shipped by UPS and must go via a common freight carrier - they are handled as a separate product type that cannot be added to the cart and must be ordered by phone.
www.scalehardware.com	Scale Hardware manufactures and sells a variety of miniature bolts and rivets for use in highly detailed scale models. These products lend themselves to purchasing from a product list, as the description of each product within a category is identical except for the actual product dimensions. The owner of the site wanted a way to include those dimensional specifications within the product listing to simplify the purchasing process for the customer. I developed a new product type for those products that allows him to enter the specifications as separate data fields on the product entry page, and then developed a custom product listing module that utilizes the extra data only for that product type. That allowed the retention of the standard product listing module for his 'regular' products.