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Category: Tips and Tricks

The essential Prestashop insider knowledge tips and tricks section. Find out how best to optimise your store and maximise conversions.

  • {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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  • 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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  • 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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  • Customising Prestashop Module Templates

    Please don’t edit those originals!

    I came across this little gem a while ago on the Prestashop forum, and thought I would draw attention to it in the hopes that it will help someone, somewhere.

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  • Preventing the copying of your site design templates

    I was browsing the prestashop forum and ended up on a thread concerning an issue with people stealing a site design by downloading the template files from the theme directory. It struck me that this is probably something that those of you who use other template systems with your sites may also face, so thought I’d post the solution here too.

    The problem is that although php files cannot be viewed directly on your browser, other source files can be e.g. files ending in .tpl

    The best way to protect your site is to change the permissions on these files to 600. This will make them accessible only by your own code on the server and present anyone nosey enough to try and look at them with a 403 (forbidden) error. The same is true for php files (although these shouldn’t display the source unless your server configuration is broken).

    Simple.