pcampbell.me.uk

Category: Development Resources

The source for Prestashop developers with example module code, example theme layout files and tools to help develop great resources for Prestashop.

  • {Less} is more?

    {Less} is more?

    So today I had to go out on a school trip with my son, so I knew I had limited work time. I thought it was a good opportunity to catch up with the latest Prestashop news and the first stop was the Prestashop Blog. The first entry I read was an interesting (and well-reasoned) summary of the workflow for building themes by Pierre-Alain Leboucher, and at the end of the post I came across a reference to {less}.

    I don’t mind admitting that I love reading about new technologies and techniques, and predictably a google search later and I was browsing various sites, and getting more and more hooked on the concept by the minute.

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  • 1.4 Plugins Revisited – Part 2

    Extending Prestashop Theme Plugins

    In 1.4 Plugins Revisited – Part 1 we looked at creating a “Plugin” class to allow us to insert some handy theme plugins to insert the output of module hooks, cms pages and Prestashop config variables at arbitrary points in our themes. In this part we look at a mechanism to allow theme developers to include their own smarty plugins seamlessly into their themes, with the code contained within the theme distribution itself.

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  • 1.4 Plugins Revisited – Part 1

    Plugins Evolved

    A while ago when I wrote the original article on Prestashop plugins I promised a follow-up to allow it to be used with smarty 3. Unfortunately work has kept me from a proper write-up so I’m only now getting around to publishing the next version. I had intended adding the ability to easily extend the functionality on a per-theme basis, but since the demand for some usable code right now has been so great I’ve decided to publish this in two parts. I will try to ensure that Part 2 doesn’t take as long to appear as this article has!

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  • Latest Theme and Module Development Tools News – March 2011

    Since Prestashop 1.4 has now gone into production,  the original Smarty debug module has been updated to support the latest features. Specifically this means that you should be able to debug both Smarty v2 and Smarty v3 Pretashop themes using the tool. You can read more about it and download the module from the Debugging Prestashop Templates page.

    Another development module to be released soon is an implementation of a code profiler for use in optimising Prestashop custom builds as well as a new release from our Plugins for Prestashop project. The latter has us fairly excited as it has opened up some really original ways of building stores without the need to resort to major code modifications and overrides.

  • Tired of hooks? Try a Plugin (Prestashop 1.4)

    Please note that this version only works currently for Smarty v2, enabling smarty v3 will cause an error. I’ll post an update that resolves this issue shortly.

    Update: This article has been revised in: 1.4 Plugins Revisited

    In a previous article Display Module Output Anywhere I touched on the subject of subverting Prestashop’s internal Module architecture to our own ends. In this article we’ll be looking at creating a new mechanism for injecting module output into themes that doesn’t rely on tedious code changes, and should be able to be employed by (almost) anyone regardless of programming ability.

    How about being able to display the home featured products anywhere in your template files just by adding a single line (as below)?

    {plugin module='homefeatured' hook='home'}

    If this looks like something you would find useful, then read on….

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  • The Ultimate Prestashop Module and Theme Development Tool

    Debugging Prestashop Templates

    While stumbling around the internet as you do when pondering a particularly awkward programming challenge, I came across an excellent post on smarty debug with FireBug. This inspired me to pull together a Prestashop module to allow store owners, designers and developers to view indepth debugging data from right within the Prestashop environment.

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  • Display module output anywhere

    I came across a post on the Prestshop forum recently that was discussing how to display the contents of a single module on a page. The example proposed worked, but it seems to me that it worked only through sheer luck rather than design as all that was being done was to display a smarty .tpl file. The smarty variables required for the module used in the example were all included as global values, so it worked, but most other modules would need to be able to execute their underlying hook code in order to display anything meaningful.

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  • Storing complex configuration data

    While porting the WP-Cumulus plugin to Prestashop I came across an interesting situation. In the original plugin the parameters for the Flash movie are stored in an array that is obtained from the WordPress database using a get_option() call. In Prestashop the parameters can be retrieved in bulk using Configuration::getMultiple(), but in that case you have to specify the key names for all the parameters which is a pain.

    What I decided to do was to use the serialize() and unserialize() php functions and store the options as a single configuration item in the database. That way we use:

    // Get the options
$newoptions = unserialize(Configuration::get($this->name.'_options'));

// Save the options
Configuration::updateValue($this->name.'_options', serialize($newoptions));

    The above works great in this situation, as the parameter names aren’t language dependent, but this technique isn’t suitable if your configuration data key needs to be defined in multiple languages.

  • New PrestaShop 1.1 Developer Resources Announced

    The PrestaShop Blog has announced (in French only currently) a couple of long awaited developer resources, which look to be a pre-cursor to the official 1.1RC1 release which we expect to be made shortly.

    The first is a data model of the PrestaShop database produced from MSQL Workbench, which is available for download from the PrestaShop website. It’s their announced intention to update this for each new version of the software, and will greatly assist in the process of new module creation for this open source eCommerce store.

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