Written by Paul Campbell.
Published on Thursday 16th June 2011 at 2244 BST.
Updated on Thursday 16th June 2011 at 2310 BST.
{Less}
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.
Continue reading "{Less} is more?"
Posted on June 16, 2011 | Related Categories: Development Resources, Tips and Tricks | 1 comment
Written by Paul Campbell.
Published on Friday 10th June 2011 at 1150 BST.
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.
Continue reading "1.4 Plugins Revisited – Part 2"
Posted on June 10, 2011 | Related Categories: Development Resources, Prestashop, Tips and Tricks | 8 comments
Written by Paul Campbell.
Published on Wednesday 8th June 2011 at 1414 BST.
Updated on Friday 10th June 2011 at 1156 BST.
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!
Continue reading "1.4 Plugins Revisited – Part 1"
Posted on June 8, 2011 | Related Categories: Development Resources, Prestashop, Tips and Tricks | 11 comments
Written by Paul Campbell.
Published on Monday 7th February 2011 at 1625 BST.
Updated on Monday 13th June 2011 at 1312 BST.
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….
Continue reading "Tired of hooks? Try a Plugin (Prestashop 1.4)"
Posted on February 7, 2011 | Related Categories: Development Resources, Tips and Tricks | 17 comments
Written by Paul Campbell.
Published on Saturday 2nd January 2010 at 2057 BST.
Updated on Tuesday 14th June 2011 at 1012 BST.
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.
Continue reading "Display module output anywhere"
Posted on January 2, 2010 | Related Categories: Development Resources, Tips and Tricks | 7 comments
eCartService.net was 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. 
