Prestashop Overview

About Prestashop

Founded in Paris, France, by Internet enthusiasts and e-Commerce professionals Igor Schlumberger and Bruno Lévêque. PrestaShop™ is a new “Open Source” professional e-Commerce shopping cart software.

PrestaShop’s has a cleaver Back Office tool and transplantable module blocks for adding and fine-tuning each storefront (Front Office). This allows non-technical people and shop owners the ability to style aspects of their Front Office look without touching a single line of code or CSS. Despite its Flexibility and advanced functionality however, PrestaShop is lightweight and thus fast. This means the software will work on lower spec hardware

PrestaShop e-Commerce takes advantage of Web 2.0 innovations such as dynamic AJAX-powered features. The main AJAX features are delivered using the powerful JQuery library, a very good, powerful and stable JavaScript framework. Prestashop also makes use of the Smarty presentation framework, which helps ensure designers don’t have to deal with raw PHP code and also provides function for speeding up development.

Over the coming weeks I will document the way the software works and the features supported on this website. This will start with the administrators guide and be followed with a designers Guide (including a Smary primer) and finish with the Prestashop Developers Guide.

Current Prestashop Release version: 1.1 (Dec 08)
PrestaShop is currently at release 1.1 and for such a  new product I was surpised by the about of standard functionality.

Official Forum: Prestshop Forum

Administrators Guide Navigation

The Adminstrators Guide navigation is largely based on the default BackOffice tabs order that ships with Prestashop 1.1. However, due to the flexibility of Prestashop, it is possible to change the menu tabs for each and every installation. Therefore, be aware that your installation may not follow the same structure. (Ealier versions will also have a different structure, for example the employees section was previoulsy in the tools menu).

Bug Fixes

Refer to the Prestshop Bug Tracker

Also see this post for fixes for identified bugs in version 1.1 Final (Dec 2008)