I recently had a request to replace display of hotsellers, featured, etc products with something more customizable. What we ended up doing was the following:

1. Create a new category in zencart admin and disable (ignore the warning about products being removed – its a new category so there can’t be products)
2. link products wanted into the new category
3. In the template, load products with ZMProducts::instance()->getProductsForCatetgoryId(). The category id needs to be hardcoded here, so if you are using the templates across several installations (for example a QA site!) you might want to configure the actual categoryIds as settings…
4. Manage the products displayed by linking/removing products in a special category