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I haven't had a chance to delve into it myself beyond watch some evangelism videos.  My day job is TV-over-the-internet using C# & .NET, so I'm unlikely to ever get a chance to play with it.  It _sounds_ useful, though, when I compare it to the tightly-coupled data-access + presentation code in ZC.  However, ZC's the only exposure I've had to PHP; I wouldn't have thought everything is the same.

I wish ZC had a more mainstream approach to source control; public repository and take patch submissions from the audience.  Are there reasons why that's not the practise, do you know?  It kinda feels like a touchy subject back on the ZC forums.

I'm not really looking forward to the merge I'll need to do when 1.4 drops (though I _am_ eagerly anticipating seeing the touted performance improvements!).

devside.net makes an all-in-one frictionless installer for Windows that sets you up with Apache, MySQL, PHP and a few other things.

Backups - Zen Cart (actually, any database-driven website) consists of the PHP files and the database; for a complete backup, you need to backup both things.  There's a howto on zen-cart.com's tutorials section for how to backup a database using phpMyAdmin (or you could use the MySQL GUI tools from mysql.net - MySQL Administrator, specifically).  To backup the PHP etc, you take a copy of the zen cart directory.

TortoiseSVN is a tool for interfacing with subversion source control repositories.  It's open-source and free, and comes with extensive (and user-friendly!) documentation both on the use of the tool, and the use of source control in general.

Well, I'll submit patches for some stuff then, if you'd like?  Do you have a subversion repository someplace, or would you like the raw diffs?

Ah, yeah - SEO.  I must hook up SEFU sometime soon...  Not to mention find some way to educate my client that filling in "all that boring text stuff in the admin bits" will probably make her more money...

Have you tried out any of the SEO-related contributions like SEFU, Froogle feed thing, Google sitemap thing?  Are there other good ones?  I found Image Handler 2 the other day, and ****ing hell but that makes images easier to deal with...

If you have a google for "classicx", that's a more XHTML one that I used as the basis for my store so far.  I was tearing my hair out trying to find something that at least gave semantic markup a nod, 'til finding that.  Now, I've customised it to something rather pretty using CSS and a smattering of JavaScript.

However, I don't know where to find pre-built pretty templates, sorry.

Hi Kev

Thanks; I've merged it in without issue - all hail subversion.  I also battled my way through the SQL a bit at a time (via phpMyAdmin), and that appears to be working fine too.

However, a couple things I noticed:
* I don't think there's a need to add the euro-symbol; I think it comes pre-set in zen cart 1.3.7.  I also think that if you keep it in, you should change it to the HTML entity code ampersand-euro-semicolon rather than the actual symbol itself...?  I don't know, to be honest, whether or where encoding happens in MySQL/phpmyadmin/zen's-own-SQL-thing.
* I think it would be kinder to people like me if you split up the SQL patch into more than one file; one for the layout-box whatsits (that I didn't need to do), and one for the tax/country/zone stuff, and one for the finishing-touches part.  The user can then cherry-pick which stuff they want, which is useful if, like me, they have a store already (well; have done stuff to a store, but not made it live).  Would you like a patch?
* A bit of documentation for post-install, pointing the user at what they might look at in the admin section to reassure themselves the template worked.  I imagine your audience has a lot of non-technicals?  That would probably be a very nice thing for them.  "Oh, go to the tax zones bit in the admin, see UK VAT - oh, yes, there it is!" kinda thing.
* Consider removing (or, documenting _how_ to remove) the pre-existing "taxable goods" tax class.
* Consider writing example SQL to change all the products from the pre-existing "taxable goods" class to the "UK VAT" class - something I'm now doing by hand (I don't know the MySQL dialect; my background is Microsoft products ).

Anyhow - I seem to be ok.  Thanks _very_ much for your package!  I'll come back and share a link to my site when it goes live (I hate showing people preliminary stuff), if you'd like a look.

Cheers
Pete