Who would have believed it! Well to celebrate, and also to fix a few problems it’s recently been updated. You can grab the latest version, as always, from the Addstuff page

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.