Sohrab330,
Thank you so much for posting the CSS that solved one of your problems! Posting the CSS will benefit not only you but anyone else who wants a nicer looking Phoca Cart form.
Also thank you for seeing the main point I was trying to make – Asking questions in separate posts and having a descriptive title rather than putting six questions in the same post would help all of us.
You are right that this forum is to ask questions. But before you ask a question, you should do your best to answer the question yourself. For example, you asked if Phoca Cart has a manual. The answer is Yes. But the Phoca Cart Manual is very easy to find and download and is nearly 200 pages long - so asking a question about that implies that you are not trying very hard to find the answer before asking the question. Instead download the manual and read it before asking questions. The link to the Phoca Cart Manual is at the bottom of the Phoca Home page. Here it is:
https://www.phoca.cz/documentation/cate ... -component
The forum is for questions that are not answered in the manual. I am a retired teacher and website builder. One of my goal for the coming year is to help improve the Phoca Cart Manual. But the Phoca Cart manual is already MUCH BETTER than the manuals for many other shopping carts!
As for me bragging, I did not mean to brag. I was simply pointing out that I have spent many years working with nearly every shopping cart in existence. All shopping carts have lots of problems! When I help build an online store for someone, I often spend more than 100 hours just building the framework for the store, solving the problems related to that store and teaching the store owner how to post products to their store. I definitely think you need to realize that building an online store is a major commitment and it is not fair to expect the Phoca Cart Team to build your store for you.
So here is my advice. And this is what I do. If I have a problem with any shopping cart, I spend at least 10 hours trying to solve the problem myself. I read all of the manuals. I read all of the past forum posts. I inspect the code. I try very hard to solve it myself.
I only post questions to difficult topics that I can not solve. I do not post question that are merely about CSS appearance stuff.
You claim that you appreciate the time and energy and effort of the developers. But the way to really appreciate them is to help them – not post a half dozen questions that you could have solved yourself if you simply did a little more research.
Finally, you raise a good point at the end of your post.
There needs to be a more obvious way on the Phoca website and as a fixed post to the top of this forum to provide paid assistance to small business owners who want to use Phoca Cart but do not have the technical background to solve the dozens of display and function problems that always come up. There also needs to be a more obvious way for people to donate to this project. But instead of asking this question as a new forum post, you put it at the end of this post. It would be much more helpful if you would
put questions like that in a new forum post where others with the same question could find it.
But in any case, here are the answers to those two questions:
There are links at the bottom of the Phoca Home page (again, if you would spend a few minutes doing research, you could have easily found these links.
Here is the link to donate to the project:
https://www.phoca.cz/support
If you would like custom help from the main developer of this project, simply contact him at this link:
https://www.phoca.cz/contact
Their Custom Development page says:
If you need to customize some Phoca or Joomla! extension, please send a request per Phoca contact form.
I think what it should say is that if you need any kind of help completing your online store, then fill out the form. They will likely look at what you have done so far and estimate how many hours it would take to complete the job. I assume Jan can give you a quote estimating the hours required for whatever project you want done. I have read many posts where he has replied to forum comments that the question or feature they are asking for would be very difficult and would require a lot of work. What he is really saying is that things that would take a huge amount of his time, you should contact him and he will give you a quote.
Thanks again to Jan, Benno, Christine and others working on this project. Keep up the good work!