• http://bit.ly/U7jB2 a reason why most people prefer Open Source, rather than building communities based on commercial products #

I’m not a great fan of commercial software, but there are some tools that are probably worth paying for — otherwise the author wouldn’t be able to maintain the code. I know from personal experience that relying on donations doesn’t pay the bills.

I came across PSE Terminator today and I must say I’m quite impressed. I usually have to do all of this by hand and this tool could save a huge amount of time. I’ll need to start saving up so I can afford to buy it!

I’m working on enhancements to the mobile site, and it should now render automatically in a nice friendly format for mobile browser users. The theme is still fairly plain, but i’ll brand it a bit better over the coming weeks. If you want to see how looks if you have an iPhone — you can do so using this emulator.

I’ll be testing out url shortening to go with the Twitter changes on the site, so expect things to not work… bit.ly here I come.

I finally got around to doing something with the twitter updates on the page after the big crash this week – my old code obviously wasn’t up to much and had been added in a hurry. Fingers crossed…

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.

Continue reading "Customising Prestashop Module Templates"

Debugging can be such a pain sometimes…

I’ve been using FirePHP for some time now on my CodeIgniter projects and recently while I was looking at doing some cool things with the product data returned by the Category::getProducts() function it struck me that it would be nice to be able to easily see what data was returned. Why I’ve never used the FirePHP class in my Prestashop projects before I’ve no idea, as it really is very simple to use, if a little erratic in its behaviour….

Continue reading "Using FirePHP (FireBug) with Prestashop"

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.