Changing Languages and Character Settings in ZenCart

Most of our clients would like to use more than one language in their template shop. Here we provide the directions on how to configure your template for multiple language usage.

First of all, you can download the desired languages. We recommend you to use the original language packages provided by www.ZenCart.com.

Please, use this link to get into Zen Cart Downloads Section.

Please, download the desired language packages to your local computer. Then unzip the files and upload them to the appropriate language catalogue and admin directories (located under “/includes/languages” and “/admin/includes/languages”, accordingly). If you dont’t have these folders, you need to create them through your Panel’s file manager or via FTP. Open your shop admin-panel and navigate to the Languages entry of the Localization menu. On the new page click the New Language button. Set the language configurations and press Insert.

If you need to set the default language different from the original one you simply click on any language and click the Edit button.

To delete the current language press Delete.

Then in the current language settings, check Set as default box and press the update button.

Some languages require additional charachters to avoid text displaying errors (E.g. Ẅ, Ậ, Ạ). To switch to non-English characters please locate your ZenCart installation in the FileManager, and look for the “/includes/languages/” folder under the store’s directory. Find the language file in use and search for the following lines:

@setlocale(LC_TIME, ‘en_US.ISO_8859-1′);

// charset for web pages and emails

define(‘CHARSET’, ‘iso-8859-1′);

Replace the en_US.ISO_8859-1 string with the one that describes the charset, appropriate for your language.

Further information about those can be found on the addresses below:

http://us3.php.net/function.setlocale
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vclib/html/_crt_language_strings.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vclib/html/_crt_country_strings.asp

To change the text on the front page you will need to do some coding. You should modify current language file that you use. Originally, it is in the folder “/includes/languages/english/classic/index.php”. You may edit this file by opening it with a simple text editor and replace the Congratulations… text with your own one. Please, make sure you do not change any other coding to avoid malfunctioning of the template.

Changing Languages and Character Settings in ZenCart