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  • Cookie Warning – Free EU Cookie Law Module

    I was looking for some way of at least attempting to comply with the EU cookie laws which come into full effect in the UK this month, so i had a look for a WordPress plugin for this site and came across Cookie warning for wordpress. Now I’m not a legal expert and have no idea whether this is sufficient or not but my theory is that at least I’ve made an effort…..

    Just for a bit of fun I decided to port the WordPress Plugin to Prestashop and the result is available below. It was noted that the check wasn’t persistent, so I have updated the javascript that handles the consent check cookie.

    This is provided free and without any warranty whatsoever. It may not even work.

    Download the Free EU Cookie Law “Cookie Warning” Module – Latest Version
    Version 0.2 – Oops!
    Initial release version – version 0.1

  • Prestashop Google Product Search

    Since August 2008 when we first released a Google Product Search (Google Base) module a lot has changed. Not only has Google’s own service undergone a series of changes to the feed specification, Prestashop has also moved on.

    The release of Prestashop 1.4.x in particular has seen support for many of the additional data items not previously possible to include, along with major changes in the generation of SEO urls which alone merit a code refresh. It has also become much harder to get good rankings in Product Search as the uptake has increased, and more attention needs to be taken in terms of feed data quality than ever before.

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  • {Less} is more?

    So today I had to go out on a school trip with my son, so I knew I had limited work time. I thought it was a good opportunity to catch up with the latest Prestashop news and the first stop was the Prestashop Blog. The first entry I read was an interesting (and well-reasoned) summary of the workflow for building themes by Pierre-Alain Leboucher, and at the end of the post I came across a reference to {less}.

    I don’t mind admitting that I love reading about new technologies and techniques, and predictably a google search later and I was browsing various sites, and getting more and more hooked on the concept by the minute.

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  • 1.4 Plugins Revisited – Part 2

    Extending Prestashop Theme Plugins

    In 1.4 Plugins Revisited – Part 1 we looked at creating a “Plugin” class to allow us to insert some handy theme plugins to insert the output of module hooks, cms pages and Prestashop config variables at arbitrary points in our themes. In this part we look at a mechanism to allow theme developers to include their own smarty plugins seamlessly into their themes, with the code contained within the theme distribution itself.

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  • 1.4 Plugins Revisited – Part 1

    Plugins Evolved

    A while ago when I wrote the original article on Prestashop plugins I promised a follow-up to allow it to be used with smarty 3. Unfortunately work has kept me from a proper write-up so I’m only now getting around to publishing the next version. I had intended adding the ability to easily extend the functionality on a per-theme basis, but since the demand for some usable code right now has been so great I’ve decided to publish this in two parts. I will try to ensure that Part 2 doesn’t take as long to appear as this article has!

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  • Latest Theme and Module Development Tools News – March 2011

    Since Prestashop 1.4 has now gone into production,  the original Smarty debug module has been updated to support the latest features. Specifically this means that you should be able to debug both Smarty v2 and Smarty v3 Pretashop themes using the tool. You can read more about it and download the module from the Debugging Prestashop Templates page.

    Another development module to be released soon is an implementation of a code profiler for use in optimising Prestashop custom builds as well as a new release from our Plugins for Prestashop project. The latter has us fairly excited as it has opened up some really original ways of building stores without the need to resort to major code modifications and overrides.

  • Tired of hooks? Try a Plugin (Prestashop 1.4)

    Please note that this version only works currently for Smarty v2, enabling smarty v3 will cause an error. I’ll post an update that resolves this issue shortly.

    Update: This article has been revised in: 1.4 Plugins Revisited

    In a previous article Display Module Output Anywhere I touched on the subject of subverting Prestashop’s internal Module architecture to our own ends. In this article we’ll be looking at creating a new mechanism for injecting module output into themes that doesn’t rely on tedious code changes, and should be able to be employed by (almost) anyone regardless of programming ability.

    How about being able to display the home featured products anywhere in your template files just by adding a single line (as below)?

    {plugin module='homefeatured' hook='home'}

    If this looks like something you would find useful, then read on….

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  • The Ultimate Prestashop Module and Theme Development Tool

    Debugging Prestashop Templates

    While stumbling around the internet as you do when pondering a particularly awkward programming challenge, I came across an excellent post on smarty debug with FireBug. This inspired me to pull together a Prestashop module to allow store owners, designers and developers to view indepth debugging data from right within the Prestashop environment.

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  • Display module output anywhere

    I came across a post on the Prestshop forum recently that was discussing how to display the contents of a single module on a page. The example proposed worked, but it seems to me that it worked only through sheer luck rather than design as all that was being done was to display a smarty .tpl file. The smarty variables required for the module used in the example were all included as global values, so it worked, but most other modules would need to be able to execute their underlying hook code in order to display anything meaningful.

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  • Vanilla 2 and Prestashop

    I’ve long loved the original Vanilla forum by Mark O’Sullivan, but I’ve got to say that the new Garden and Vanilla 2 release has bowled me over. Although still in BETA I was so excited about using it in my latest project that I sat down and wrote a module for Prestashop to allow you to provide a slick single sign-on to both the store and the forum — utilising the SSO plugin that comes with Vanilla 2.

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