There are a couple of basic things which every OpenCart store owner needs to know when setting up an online store. Among these are adding a currency and a language different than the default OpenCart ones (USD/EUR/GBP and English respectively).

In this blog post we will show you a step-by-step tutorial how you can do these two set ups only from your OpenCart admin panel.

Adding a New Currency

1. Login to your admin panel and navigate to System >> Localisation >> Currencies and click on the Add new currency button.

2. After you click the button you will see the form for new a currency. In our example we will be adding Bulgarian lev and the form should be completed in the following manner:

The Currency Title is a required field and its input will be shown in your store front under currencies

In the Code field you will need to add the ISO code of the currency, which you can find here: http://www.xe.com/iso4217.php
The Symbol Left and Symbol Right fields are not required, which means that you can leave them empty. However, we would suggest you to add a symbol if your currency has one, as it gives a clearer idea to the customer for the price of a given product. These are two examples of a currency with symbol left:

and a currency with symbol right:

The left and right symbols are also showing under currencies in the store front:

The Decimal Places field sets how many digits to be displayed after the decimal point. If left blank, the prices will be rounded to a whole number.
The Value field sets the value of the new currency in comparison to the default currency. If you would like your new currency to be the default one, you should type in 1. If you type in any other number or leave the input blank, the value will be calculated automatically. If you, however, wish to set up a value different than the official one, after you have saved the currency, click on the Edit button and type the desired value in the field and click save. In this way, the added by you value will be used when calculating the price.
After setting the Status to ‘Enabled’ your new currency will be enabled in your store

3.After you have filled in all of the settings, make sure that the ISO code is correct and Save the new currency.

If you have followed the steps carefully, you will get a success message saying that Currencies have been modified. Now is the time to go to your store-front and check if everything is alright with the recently added currency.

Auto-update currencies

In general, OpenCart automatically updates the values of the currencies in your store. However, you can disable this setting from System >> Settings >> Store >> Local >> Auto Update Currency >> No.

Add New Language

In the second part of the tutorial we will demonstrate you how you can add a new language.

1.Login to your admin panel and navigate to System >> Localisation >> Languages and click on the Add new currency button

2. An Add-New-Language form will show up. In our example we will be adding Bulgarian language. The form should be completed as following:

Similarly to the Currency, the Language name input field is required and it will be displayed in the front store under languages:

In the Language Code field you have to add the code of the new language which you can find here: https://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php
You can find your Language Locale here: https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/i18n#localeTable
The Image field sets the image name of the flag of the new language. The flag is displayed in the header of the store-front as well as in most of the text input fields in your admin panel.

The language images come with your OpenCart installation and are in the following folders for the admin and store front respectively: admin/view/image/flags and image/flags. If you would like to a new image that will be associated with your language, you can upload it in the mentioned folders and specify its name in the image field.

The Directory field specifies the name of the directory in the admin/language andcatalog/language folders, where the language files of your OpenCart website are stored. In the general case, the directory name is the name of the language written with lowercase Latin characters.
When the Status is set to ‘Enabled’, the new language is enabled in your store.
The Sort Order sets the ordering of the languages.

3. After you have filled in all of the settings, make sure that the language code, image name and directory are correct and Save the new language.

If you have followed the steps carefully, you will get a success message saying that Languages have been modified.

Note: Keep in mind that adding a new language through your admin doesn’t mean that your store will automatically get translated. In order to learn how you can do that, check our blogpost on “How to add new languages to your OpenCart extensions?”

We hope that you will find this tutorial helpful and easy to follow. Please, address your feedback and questions in the comments section below.