In one of the review threads on the PrestaShop forum there was a particular gallery feature that caught the eye, and I decided to adapt it slightly for more general use. It’s basically just the Featured Products module adapted to use the javascript gallery rather than the standard tabular layout, and it certainly looks more effective.
(more…)Tag: Prestashop
-
Shopmania Feed – UK
** There is now an official script for PrestaShop available and this module is no longer supported. **
It’s been a busy few weeks, and we’ve been caught up in the Christmas rush as many of you out there hopefully are too. It’s a busy time for stores – the busiest of the year – and hopefully the gloom and doom regarding ‘Credit Crunches’ and ‘Bank Bail-outs’ hasn’t affected you too much.
One of our regulars on the UK PrestaClub Forum suggested that a feed for Shopmania would be nice, so we threw this together. Sadly it is currently written to provide a feed for the UK service, although we plan to add some configuration in the next release to allow you to choose which country you would like to create the feed for. The more technical of you out there will have no trouble altering the module as it stands to produce a feed for your own country should you want to.
Version 1.0 (November 2008) : UK Shopmania Feed v1.0
-
PrestaShop 1.1 Beta 2 is now on public release
This is a translation from the PrestaShop official Blog article
This long-awaited version brings new features and bug fixes, detailed in the following list:
New Features
Back-office
General
- Complete Statistics System (PrestaShop Statistics ™)
- CSV Import System (similar to Excel)
- Improvements in billing system (numbers and names for invoices)
- Acceleration of TinyMCE through PHP Compressor
- Ability to access your store (with specified IP address) when in maintenance mode
- Ability to create a discount coupon valid only for one or more categories
- Modules can be disabled without un-installing them
- Ability to send a coupon to your customers on their birthday
- Improvements to configuration of payment modules (filtering by currency, zones)
- Product Search by reference
- Search orders via the Cart ID (used in some payment modules as the reference)
Products
- Ability to enter the location in your warehouse
- Ability to set the purchase price for a product group
Admin
- Create a delivery for every order
- Managment of pre-defined messages to your customers
- Ability to refund shipping
- Display of the total weight of the order in detail
Front-office
General
- Creation of “Wish” lists
- Customer loyalty/reward facility
- Content Manager for static pages (GCS, Legal …)
- Management of meta-tags for all pages
Cart
- Displaying the latest product added
- Displaying the remaining purchase amount required for free shipping
Categories
- Added a linked image to highlight a set of products – “scene”
Products
- Customizable Products (photos, text)
- Management of customer product reviews
- Watermarks on product images
- Improved information display relating to availability
- New SEO URL that takes into account the category in which the product is placed (eg / category/24-product.html)
Documentation
- MySQL Workbench physical model Database (MPD)
Bug fixes and updates
In addition, many bugs were fixed including the PayPal module, with the help of the community! The following tools used by PrestaShop have also been updated: jQuery, TinyMCE, FPDF
-
PrestaShop Boasts Great New Features in Version 1.1
Hot on the heels of the recent PrestaShop Developer Resources Announcement we thought it would be a good idea to look at some of the great new features that the forthcoming 1.1 RC1 PrestaShop release will bring to the store owner.
The main improvements (apart from some long awaited bug fixes, and core improvements) are a fantastic set of new features to further enhance the appearance and usability of PrestaShop.
The major Back Office improvements come with the release of the statistics modules, and I can assure you that if this is a feature you feel has been missing in the past, it certainly won’t disappoint.
Some nice examples of what to expect:
Main Statistics Screen 
Visitor Demographics 
Visitor Browser and Operating System Along with these Back Office improvements there are a number of Front Office additions that further enhance the usability of your site from the customer’s perspective. The main highlights are:
- Customer Wish List
- Rewards scheme (offering loyalty discount points)
- Customer referrals (affiliate) scheme
- Facility to offer a “Birthday” present to your customers!
PrestaShop is truly developing intot he most user and owner firendly open source shopping cart solution out there.
-
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.
(more…) -
Randomly Displayed Adverts and Callouts
Another useful tool for conversions is being able to attract the attention of your visitors and guide them to the parts of your site you really want them to see. We’ve come up with yet another great little PrestaShop module to do precisely that!
(more…) -
Live Support to Improve Conversions
A common theme in small business forums and newsgroups when discussing eCommerce sites are posts that start with “I’ve had x,000 visitors to my site but haven’t sold anything, what am I doing wrong?”.
Sadly, selling on-line isn’t (just) about visitors, but conversions. Getting a customer to look at a product is one hurdle, but by far the more important one is getting them to actually part with their cash! This is where many come unstuck.
(more…) -
BETA Version 2 Paypal Module for PrestaShop
We’re pleased to release BETA 1 of our modified version of the PrestaShop Paypal Payment module that will hopefully address a few more of the shortcomings of the original 1.0.0.8 version.
This latest version provides tighter integration with IPN notifications, and supports all the current message combinations for both instant and eCheck payments. Refunds and cancellations are also supported, although only as far as this functionality is supported by PrestaShop itself.
(more…) -
eCartService Paypal Changes rolled into PrestaShop 1.1 Release
We’re pleased to announce that the initial changes we proposed for the Paypal Payment module for PrestaShop have been incorporated into the official 1.1 release which is due in autumn 2008.
We appreciate the PrestaShop’s team recognition of our efforts and look forward to working with them even more in the future. We are committed to making PrestaShop an even better eCommerce platform for forward-thinking companies, and wish their up-coming release every success.
-
Improving PayPal Support in PrestaShop
When I first came across PrestaShop I was utterly astonished at how it looked and operated. Having spent years working with the likes of osCommerce, ZenCart et al. PrestaShop was a breath of fresh air, which reminded me greatly of another Open Source favourite of mine – Vanilla.
Having now spent some time working with PrestaShop and it’s underlying code, some of the shine has dulled a little, but there’s nothing that I can find that can’t be buffed back up to the stunning product that it surely will be.
The first challenge was getting simple custom design elements on the page like ssl cert images with java/html links etc. without requiring users to modify the template. PrestaShop’s intuitive module system is great for this, but these are trivial bits of code that don’t really justify the overhead of full modules of their own. AddStuff was born. Well that was easy!
Next it was the Paypal Payment Module which seemed to have issues. Initially the main problems were orders being “lost” due to lack of fsockopen support on their hosting platforms (the only connection method supported in the default module), but others were reporting issues with being unable to run multiple shop installations from a single PayPal account. The latter issue impacted my customers and to be honest would be a major deficiency.
A few weeks ago I posted a stop-gap solution which corrected a bug in the PayPal payment module which enabled multiple shop support, and yet another a little later to improve connectivity for IPN validation by adding support for fsockopen over https (the standard version surprisingly used only an insecure http connection) plus support for cURL as an alternative should the fsockopen method fail.
Over the past week work has progressed on a major overhaul of the module, to hopefully start addressing some of the more underlying problems with poor integration, and failure to capture carts abandoned at the payment stage.
The new version is nearing completion, and I’m currently looking for some volunteers to provide language translations, assuming I’ve got the internationalisation correct, plus some brave souls willing to BETA test on their sites. Anyone interested can post on here, or contact me at the PrestaShop forum: user Paul C.
