The Ultimate Prestashop Module and Theme Development Tool
Posted by admin | Filed under Development Resources, Free Prestashop Modules
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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Tags: design, development
Display module output anywhere
Posted by admin | Filed under Development Resources, Tips and Tricks
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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Tags: cron, development, Free Prestashop Modules
Resetting your Prestashop
Posted by admin | Filed under Development Resources
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!
Tags: development, prestashop backoffice
Using FirePHP (FireBug) with Prestashop
Posted by admin | Filed under Development Resources, Tips and Tricks
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….
Tags: debug tools, development
Storing complex configuration data
Posted by admin | Filed under Development Resources
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.
Tags: coding style, development, module
Paypal WPP (Example) – PayPal Direct API
Posted by admin | Filed under Development Resources, Free Prestashop Modules, Prestashop
Development Release
I’ve been asked several times about this, so I guess I’d better release the code. This was written some time ago, and the target PrestaShop version was 1.1, however it should work with later releases.
The archive contains additional code to support PayPal Express Checkout, as this was originally developed as a shared library. A PayPal Express Checkout example will also be published here shortly.
Please note that this is intended for “development” purposes only as an example and was written to test out various concepts in PrestaShop, not as a robust payment method for use in commercial stores.
Tags: development, example, module, payment, paypal
New PrestaShop 1.1 Developer Resources Announced
Posted by admin | Filed under Development Resources, Prestashop
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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Tags: Prestashop
eCartService.net has been set up specifically to cater for the needs of small to medium enterprises trading online using the Prestashop eCommerce solution. It was set up in 2008 by Paul Campbell, a veteran in the IT industry who has experience of working in technology planning and implementation in some of the most diverse and technically challenging environments on the planet. 
