Learning the ropes

[bunglehaze]

Hi folks, I am new to prestashop having used the Joomla and Virtuemart combo until now for my webshop. So far my impressions are very good - fast loading and relatively easy to follow setup makes this an ideal choice for me to try out.

A few things I have noticed are niggling at me though, for the templating system - it seems a bit disjointed to be honest, not along the lines of magento (another e-commerce software I have attempted to trial) but not as simple as it could perhaps be to enable users to really individualise their sites. I am sure that as I play around a little more it will get easier but rather than using individual .tpl files would it not be simpler for the main template sections to be held in a format that everyone can understand?

Little things like the header section - if it has to be seperate how about coding the entire header together so that when a user wants to add a completely new style to it they simply have to edit one file and not search through module hooks and different files.

The other main niggle is with the lack of support for transparency images - png's and gif's are transformed to jpeg and a background is given, I have used the workaround in order to get away with the few changes I have made so far but I am certain it will become problematic in the future.

Anyhow, grumbles over and all in all I am getting on better each time I play with the software, I am very interested to see where this project will head in the future and I think you have a convert (I am working slowly on setting up my site from scratch using prestashop). Magento is way to difficult to get my head around for a simple e-commerce system, if I could make a suggestion that Prestashop could take from magento though is just the quality 'polish' they put on the system, get a little more of that built in and you will win users in their droves, one thing you could avoid taking from Virtuemart is the lack of any support on the forums - to me this is causing more headache from users who simply cannot get to grips with the various foibles and when they cant do something they look elsewhere - in my case I am looking elsewhere because I do not want to use a system that is so poorly supported.

Now a small issue, since setting up my shop I have been adding attributes in order to maintain a good stock management system. I sell motorcycle leathers, some of which come with optional extras which are chargable, when I input the price increase on the product it makes no difference to the add to cart price - have a look at: http://prestashop.moovover.co.uk and see for yourself.

I also have an issue with the stock control system too, I have asked the backend to not count stock and allow ordering etc. I cannot set the quantities any higher than they are currently at and no matter which way I attempt to configure the backend it shows the product as not available???? Any suggestions?

regards

leigh

[Dave Egerton]

Welcome

really just wanted to say, when I first stated I had big confusion with templating.

However, as you get used to it you will see the big advantages.

In your header for example, its easy to style, but because of the hooks that allow new modules to be added, you really do need the smarty tpl files in the module. Otherwise the module developer does not have control and there is no point in having HTML that would otherwise not be required.

So, basically, in your themes folder you have all your main tpl files. With modules you have installed you also know there is likely a tpl file there. The tpl files give you control to alter HTML and the Smarty PHP tags if you need

Then you style with your gloabl CSS targeting the elements you want to look a particular way

I did not know Prestashop changed png to jpegs (have not uploaded and pngs yet), but I agree, if that is the case is not good, PNG's a re used a lot now

regarding your issues with prices -are you sure you have attributes set up right. Its when you use the attributes you have set-up on the products themselves you set the rules for increasing/descreasing prices (impact on prices)

[bunglehaze]

Hi viper, thanks for the reply. I am getting used to the system a little now, quite a lot of it is intuitive but the hooks/templates/modules etc are less so - not to say i wont pick it up soon enough but it is still not as easy to template for as i would have liked.

Anyway, my problem with stock and attributes still exists, I have messed around now and have it so I can order test products but I am still getting no increase in price when I add one of the attributes - you can see it here:

http://prestashop.moovover.co.uk/10-gp-leathers-gp-silver-v.html

Also the photos I am using are not being selected when I choose the colour in the colour picker, I noticed it did do it previously but is no longer working - perhaps i start this produt again from scratch and see if the same problems exist. On a similar note is there a clone product feature built in to prestashop? If not perhaps I will add it to feature requests as it can make building a shop a lot faster.

regards

leigh

[Dave Egerton]

there is a duplicate product feature, but that is one product at a time, otherwise I believe you will have to do it via SQL (but I am unsure which tables would need to be updated) as I don't think there is any other global type duplicate feature in the backoffice as such

[bernie-s]

hello people ..

latest version works excellent except for 1 little glitch for me .. any help is appreciated

after editing a template file, saving it, the editing does not show .. only the original template is still printed even if i make the .tpl file completely blank .. this only is in new version as previous version worked perfect in this regard ..

tho' now the corresponding .php file has only this:

[ ControllerFactory::getController('AuthController')->run(); ]

[FionaWeslan]

Thanks for the post! definitely will help me with learning the ropes. Keep up the good work

[tomerg3]

hello people ..

latest version works excellent except for 1 little glitch for me .. any help is appreciated

after editing a template file, saving it, the editing does not show .. only the original template is still printed even if i make the .tpl file completely blank .. this only is in new version as previous version worked perfect in this regard ..

tho' now the corresponding .php file has only this:

[ ControllerFactory::getController('AuthController')->run(); ]

Turn on force recompile in Preferences->Performance to have the smarty cache refreshed.