My Pleasure Island (http://mypleasureisland.com) is coming to a close. I wrapped up the migration to production and tidied up a bit. Overall, this project was a good challenge because I ventured into unknown territory; Zen Cart. At fist Zen Cart was a pain in the ass because of multiple places that you have to change to get a custom theme. But once you understand the structure, it’s not nearly as bad as you’d think. Yes, I would use Zen Cart again.

Most Zen Cart installs are pretty straight forward and pre-packaged. Everything is taken care for you with a few click. When you want to create a new theme, that’s when things get interesting. A few places you need to visit when you have you Zen Cart installed is the Common, CSS, and Images folders. These are gonna be your most common working area. The configuration panel is fairly straight forward and they have a good Developer Tool to find and identify areas of the CMS that you’d want to change.

My Pleasure Island took a little longer than expected because of the technology hurdles that I had to get over. I needed to learn and build at the same time. In the end, I think it came out pretty good. Another hurdle that I came across was getting Zen Cart to work in multiple browser environments consistently. Firefox and I.E. 8 & 9 were very similar, but Chrome and I.E. 7 were tricky. Currently, MyPleasureIsland is only supported in Firefox, I.E. 7, 8 , & 9. Sorry, Chrome. You’re still my favorite browser :-D.

Check it out at http://mypleasureisland.com

Some features that I put into place:

• Age verification page that resets daily based on a cookie value
• PayPal integration
• Custom Zen Cart Template
• Custom logo design
• Shopping cart module
• Custom page layouts