PrestaShop v1.4.3: a Stronger, Safer Code and a Simplified Update! by Bruno Lévêque

My first concern when I co-created PrestaShop back in 2007 was to provide merchants with a powerful Open Source e-commerce solution, as well as precious help: being at their sides, getting interested in their projects, and accompanying them effectively in their growth.

Developers, you know as well as I that your first source of inspiration for developing comes from your customers. Each one of them, large or small, carries out projects that are interesting and also enriching on a personal level. It’s truly a pleasure to hear them, to advise them, and to take part in their daily success.

A community fully involved in the evolution of software

This new version of PrestaShop is the chance for our entire development team to bring ourselves closer to the PrestaShop community. I personally contacted more than 300 merchants in order to ask for suggestions, plans for improvement, and small daily issues.

We’re concentrating particularly on the PrestaShop updating process. Initially criticized, this process has been greatly improved and well-tested: we ran over 100 “test” updates on real online retail stores.

Here are some testimonials from agencies and vendors:

• “You have understood that most of community members designed to assist you in your development and have everything to gain by participating constructively in the debate. The 1.4.3 has erased most of the “blunders”, keep up the good work, useful to each of us for our business. ” Mickael – Alternative Watersport (France)
• “Thanks for this new version that solved my anomalies in less than a minute!” Gabor – Hypermedia (Hungary)
• “I appreciate that you personally contacted me to get my returns for the latest version, which works very well. As a new PrestaShop user I look forward to using the software for a long time to come.”Keith – Webunique (UK)
• “I realized the update on my shop in production: everything is perfect!” Laurent (France)
• “We have fixed the site with the latest version and it’s definitely working much better in terms of speed and performance! That’s great news.” Jessie – Summer Lane (Australia)

The anomalies better identified and took into account on La Forge

Substantial effort has been made on fixing bugs as quickly as possible, as illustrated by this PrestaShop Forge Graph (http://forge.prestashop.com):

3 major advances for developers:

1. Optimizing page loading time: MemCache, CCC, Media Serves (CDN)—everything has been designed to help your project be 30-50% more powerfu
2. Access to data through web-service: you can now recover, update, and add data thanks to the web-service included in PrestaShop
3. Overriding the core: no need to modify PrestaShop’s core any more. Now just place a class in the “override” folder and it will automatically be taken care of by PrestaShop. This feature enhances our current MVC and allows you to adapt PrestaShop to your customer’s specific needs, while ensuring greater durability in terms of future updates

And, some other great improvements:

• jQuery update to v1.4.4
• Smarty update to v3.0.7
• Improved standards of code (standard)
• Removing unused variables
• Lightening several slow SQL queries
• A more efficient autoload system (PHP)
• A log file created during installation, and a system that detects when stores have an incomplete update and simplifies updates
• Full control of the images from the Web-service
• New image system so you can have a catalogue with a million images

Update your shop now and make the most of the latest developments in terms of performance and improving security.
PrestaShop v.1.4.3 is famous for its reliability and number of optimizations!

By Bruno Lévêque, Prestashop Inc. CEO