Prestashop Designers Guide

Please not the designers section is only just underway and contains limited infortmation

Introduction to Designing for Prestashop

To change the look of your Prestashop store, you need nothing more than good HTML and CSS skills. However, if your serious about having the control to change more than just the style and default effects you’ll also need to get to grips with JQuery (JavaScript Library) and Smarty (PHP Templating language).

It’s at this point you might start to panic and say to yourself “But I am a designer, not a programmer”. Fear not, getting to grips with JQuery and Smarty, really is a lot easier than you think. And if you really don’t want to do any more than styling the look and feel of your store, you can of course work almost entirely with your themes CSS file. I will show you how.

During the designers guide I am going to make the assumption that you already have good XHTML and CSS skills. If you do not have these skills you might struggle to follow everything and should first learn how to build web pages to a reasonable level before following this guide.

But first, before we jump into designing for Pretastashop, we are going to take a look at the way Prestashsop files are organised. If you plan making changes to more than your themes directory, an understanding of the files structure is pretty important. We’ll then have a quick 15 minute primer on the Smarty templating and the JQuery libraries. If you have never used a PHP templating framework or JavaScrip library, I recommend that don’t you skip this primer.

Ready and sitting comfortably? Good, lets get started

Prestashop Quick Primer

Here we are providing a quick primer and covering the main files structure, but focussing on the files that are important to designers
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JQuery Primer

A brief introduction to JQuery - The flexible JavaScript library that will enhance your customers experience
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Smarty Primer

An introduction to the benefits of Smarty (PHP template engine) in Prestashop for Designers and why you should learn it.
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