The front page of foo.ca has been one of those pages that I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about. It was merely an index page with a bullet list of other sites to visit. There was no real information there, and there was nothing to bring people back to that site. At the same time, I have been creating a number of rather targetted sites that don’t necessarily point to one another directly. If for no other reason that to ease the updating of links on a bunch of sites, I’ve started to work on the front page by installing a CMS to provide some ‘intelligence’ behind the scenes.

One of the first packages that I installed was PHPNuke, which hated me, so I moved right along to PostNuke which was much nicer, but I couldn’t easily do side-by-side boxes in the center section. I really wanted to be able to present RSS feeds for my other sites on the front page here, so that on first visit, you could see all the news, and maybe find something you like. However, with the layout options, it was either place the feeds on the sides which would run forever vertically or put them side-by-side in the center. Neither option was really appealing, so I gave up on the feeds for a bit and went hunting for possible PostNuke / ZenCart integration.

I’m trying to put together a shopping cart system for Nico’s work, and I’ve installed ZenCart, which has every feature known to eCommerce except an easy to layout front page. It’s one of the worst systems I have ever seen for setting up the look and design of your storefront, and the admin interface is a bit overly complex. I get the impression that if you run a ZenCart store, odds are it LOOKS like a ZenCart store, no matter how much you fight it. Sure, there are themes you can install, but there’s something about the movement through the system that I find non-intuitive. What I’d like to be able to do is simply use the product management end of ZenCart to maintain the catalog, and to run the shopping cart and fulfillment, but to have the items displayed in-line in my CMS which is theoretically easier to improve the look of.

The only mentions I found of integration even being discussed with ZenCart and a CMS was with Mambo. Sure, the project that was mentioned is dead, but I thought it was worth a look anyhow. I installed Mambo, and now have a somewhat functional front page, though I’m still trying to nail down the layout sections and why things sometimes appear, and sometimes don’t. I haven’t broken down and started reading a manual, but it’s been close a couple times. One of the big mistakes may have been allowing the install to load some sample data into the system; while that sounds like a good idea, it’s tough to determine where to go to change things. It’s like a big scavenger hunt; turn this component off, and see what happens…