Adding a Link to the Information sidebox

Adding your own links

This page continues the FAQ on customizing the Information Sidebox. It is such a common question is has been pulled out to its own page.

The same technique can be used to add a link to the More Information sidebox or the EZ Page sidebox just by changing the file being edited.

To add a link to the Information Sidebox, we create the override file includes/templates/YOURTEMPLATE/sideboxes/tpl_information.php.

Edit this file.

Add your link before the list’s ending ul tag:

$content  .= '</ul>' . "\n";

For example, linking to an external page:

$content .= '<li><a href="https://www.zen-cart.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Greatest Shopping Cart Ever!</a></li>' . "\n" ;

Note: In subsequent examples, the appended linefeed . "\n" is dropped for clarity.

If the link if to an internal page, use the zen_href_link function. For example, if you have a page called “News” (and have defined FILENAME_NEWS and BOX_INFORMATION_NEWS), a link to this page may be added to the Information Sidebox with

$content .= '<li><a href="' . zen_href_link(FILENAME_NEWS) . '">' . BOX_INFORMATION_NEWS . '</a></li>';

If the link is to an internal EZ-Page, use

$content .= '<li><a href="' . zen_href_link(FILENAME_EZPAGES,'id=9') . '">' . "My new page" . '</a></li>';

or if you don’t want to modify code, you can just use the EZ-Pages sidebox, which displays EZ-Pages with sidebox display on and a positive sort order.

Alternate Approaches

Purists would argue that it’s not a good practice to update the template to add links, and that instead, the relevant module file should be updated. (The approach used above is more beginner friendly and lends itself to copy-and-paste ready examples for all three sideboxes, which is why it was chosen.)

You could accomplish what’s done in the first example - add a link to zen-cart.com to the Information sidebox - by creating the override file includes/modules/sideboxes/YOURTEMPLATE/information.php, and then modifying it just before the require statements to add

$information[] = '<a href="https://www.zen-cart.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Greatest Shopping Cart Ever!</a>'; 

The same process could be used to add a link to the More Information sidebox, using the $more_information array in place of $information.

However, adding a link to the EZ Pages sidebox using this technique would be more involved, since the entries in $var_linksList are arrays, not simple strings.

Specification of URLs

It’s a good practice not to hardcode non-relative URLs, in case your site moves or you want to reconstruct a test instance of it. So don’t do this:

$content .= '<li><a href="https://YOURSTORE.com/index.php?main_page=page&id=25">Important information</a></li>'; // NO 

Instead, use an URL relative to the top of your store (or better yet, use zen_href_link as in the examples above):

$content .= '<li><a href="index.php?main_page=page&id=25">Important information</a></li>'; // Better

You can read more about the importance of relative URLs to explore this topic in greater depth.

Mobile

You may need to make additional edits to control the link on mobile displays.

More Examples

See creating links to other pages.




Still have questions? Use the Search box in the upper right, or try the full list of FAQs. If you can't find it there, head over to the Zen Cart support forum and ask there in the appropriate subforum. In your post, please include your Zen Cart and PHP versions, and a link to your site.

Is there an error or omission on this page? Please post to General Questions on the support forum. Or, if you'd like to open a pull request, just review the guidelines and get started. You can even PR right here.
Last modified January 12, 2024 by Scott C Wilson (2e7ec20).