Welcome to Zen Cart™ ...


The Zen Cart™ software is made available to you for use, additions, changes, modifications, etc. without charge, under the GNU General Public License.

While we do not charge for this software, donations are greatly appreciated each time you download a new version, to help cover the expenses of maintenance, upgrades, updates, the free support forum and the continued development of this software for your online e-commerce store.

Donations can be made at: The Zen Cart™ Team Page

We appreciate your support.
The Zen Cart™ Team

Zen Cart™ is derived from: Copyright 2003 osCommerce
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY;
without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
and is redistributable under the GNU General Public License


This software is OSI Certified Open Source Software.
OSI Certified is a certification mark of the Open Source Initiative.

CHANGELOG - List of Changed Files

For a list of files that have been changed since v1.3.9a, see the changelog-v1-3-9b.html

*** SECURITY REQUIREMENT ***

For added security, Zen Cart™ comes with several .htaccess files already included in various folders to help provide protection against unwanted visitors and even against mis-use of your site in the unfortunate situation of your site being hacked. These protections prevent hackers from using your site as phishing sources.

However, for these built-in protections to work, your web hosting server administrator MUST set the AllowOverride directive in the server's apache configuration (the server's master httpd.conf file) to "All" or at least ensure it includes these parameters: 'Limit Indexes'.

ie:    AllowOverride All

or:    AllowOverride Limit Indexes    

(NOTE: You must also add "Options" if uncommenting OPTIONS directives in your .htaccess files)

Without these settings, you will likely encounter "500 Internal Server Error" messages when attempting to access various parts of your site, including perhaps the zc_install installer script.

Storeowners hosting on Windows Servers using IIS instead of Apache may need to remove the .htaccess files and rework them into suitable equivalents within your IIS configuration. See Microsoft's IIS website for specific assistance.

ADDITIONAL NOTE ABOUT .htaccess FILES

Inside some folders is an .htaccess file that lists certain *permitted* filetypes which may be accessed. (Anything else is blocked to prevent abuse on your site).

The side-effect of this is that if you choose to use media types that are not already listed in the *permitted* list, then your visitors will not be able to see those resources.

Thus, if you are using product images that are not in the list of permitted types in your /images/.htaccess, you will need to add those types to the list.

Similarly, if you are using certain media types in music product previews, you will need to make sure those are in your /media/.htaccess

And, if you are using filetypes for downloadable products that are not already listed in your /pub/.htaccess and /download/.htaccess you will need to add those as well.

Zen Cart™ Minimum Requirements

PHP 4.3.2 or higher, Apache 1.3.30 and MySQL 3.23.x or higher.

Upgrade Instructions from v1.3.9a to 1.3.9b

If you are upgrading from Zen Cart v1.3.9a to 1.3.9b, the process is simple:
- compare all the changed files with the files on your own site... and re-apply your customizations to the new files
- upload the new files (with your customizations added) to your site

If you are upgrading from a version prior to v1.3.9a, please follow the instructions in the "how to upgrade" documentation in the /docs folder.

Whats New ...

The following improvements and bugfixes are included in v1.3.9b since v1.3.9a:

  • Certain .htaccess directives were causing problems on some server configurations, so have been adjusted. If you want the security protection offered by the removed items, just uncomment them.
  • Various 3D-Secure Fixes, including proper handling of Maestro cards
  • BUGSFORUM-1195 - Minimum value of zero gets validated incorrectly in JS form_check
  • BUGSFORUM-1197 - fix problem with review sidebox not properly truncating review text
  • BUGSFORUM-1198 - fix missing lookup logic in developers-toolkit language search
  • BUGSFORUM-1199 - make ADDRESS OVERRIDE ALERT message show only to administrators, and not to customers
  • BUGSFORUM-1200 - 1.3.8-1.3.9a very small html error in collect_info.php (closing tr tag)
  • BUGSFORUM-1201 - Tax name wont show up on order if tax is 0.00
  • BUGSFORUM-1206 - onetime charge taxes
  • BUGSFORUM-1205 - Counter History problem with old MySQL versions
  • BUGSFORUM-1116 - retain html entities in product/category names/descriptions
  • Improved efficiencies in credit card identification algorithms
  • Fixes to search functionality related to use of double quotes
  • Fix problems with Free Shipping
  • Add an override to work around an email problem with using port 587 on servers not capable of actually using SSL when sending email
  • Express Checkout updates several things, including invoice numbering problems, better handling of customer-selected shipping address names, UI improvements, and more
  • BUGSFORUM-1208 - stop losing county name with GB addresses in Website Payments Pro UK
  • BUGSFORUM-1209 - State field always required when editing customer records in Admin
  • BUGSFORUM-1210 - PayPal Website Payments Pro US 10713 Invalid Data - Missing Country
  • BUGSFORUM-1211 - Yourpay/FirstData credit card CAPTUREs not processing commas correctly


Zen Cart™ Copyright 2003-2010