Will Prestashop 1.7 meet your expectations?

The raise of Open Source projects helps the developer community create great projects and Prestashop is probably one of them. Other the time, the company with the same name has built a comprehensive toolkit and a legacy code that help e-merchants to thrive at a daily basis.

Prestashop 1.7   was made available a week ago. We took some time to play around it before we give our opinion about it in this article. In a previous blog post, we have already described the new features in Prestashop 1.7. In a series of articles, we will introduce you in detail to how to make use of them and by the way what is missing and eventually what could have been added.

Better late than never! It was very important for this project to adopt a solid framework. Symfony is one of the best candidates for many reasons. I would like to say that most of the developers likes its modular architecture and it has inspired other projects like Cakephp or Laravel. Symfony is organized in loosely decoupled components with a well identified functional perimeter. Therefore it is possible to use only few components at the time rather than the whole thing – use just the template engine, or just the ORM component, you name it. What is more, this project is another French project just like… Prestashop itself. It is well documented and is used in many other big Open source projects.  As developer, in the future, I will not have to adopt a bespoke (sometimes inconsistent) naming convention and folder/code structure like in Prestashop. Any developer would be able to develop or troubleshoot Prestashop as long as he is familiar with the framework Symfony.

Prestashop 1.7 new features in the frontend

As we said in what is new in Prestashop 1.7, the new theme structure is different from the old one. Web developers were asking for a parent – child theme structure for ages. It is now available just like in WordPress. The tool editor has introduced a theme starter which will eventually allow web developers and designers to build better templates with more flexibility. For example, new concepts like widgets have been introduced. We will study in detail these features as soon as there is more documentation on that topic.

 

 

Prestashop 1.7 – Changes in the Backend

The admin area comes with a simplified navigation menu. The menu items are organized by theme. Themes available are Sell, improve and configure. It doesn’t mean there are fewer options. This is very positive improvement. Let’s hope that it will be easier to search and locate all the options. Anyway, I have always fought that Prestashop’s backend was not compact enough. it is full of lengthy admin pages with form inputs bigger than required! This new philosophy can only benefit to businessmen and women that will rely on Prestashop 1.7.x every day.

 

Features that were removed in Prestashop 1.7

Remember, the company behind Prestashop is not a charity. Although they give away the core application for free, they make huge money selling addons on their marketplace. Therefore, they will always try to increase their catalogue of paid modules.  I have noticed this trend with previous versions. New releases always miss great features and modules from the previous versions. Prestashop 1.7 is not an exception.

Here are few features you will not get (for free) any more in Prestashop 1.7:

  • Theme Configurator
  • One Page Checkout
  • Ajax search one the modules page
  • Advanced Stock Management

More to come.

What we would like to see in Prestashop

Let’s dream a little bit. It would have been great to see a native blog module shipped with Prestashop 1.7. Quite often, we see lots of Prestashop retail websites with little description and content on their product pages. On the long run, it can only damage their ranking in the Search Engine Result Pages.

Yet again, you can only edit one resource at the time. We are still right to offer our application Catalogue Mass Editor for Prestashop mass Edition. Don’t miss the new version to come before the end of the year.

The Legacy defects are still in Prestashop 1.7. One of the most famous one is the crazy cent.

32,93 x 5 = 164.65 not 164.64.

It makes me feel that there are no real improvements and the priorities of the team are the exact opposite of the merchants needs.

 

It is not possible to make any changes on Prestashop without using an FTP client. It would have been handy if developers could have a native module for editing the code just like in WordPress.

Wordpress Theme Editor CSS file

WordPress Theme Editor CSS file

 

How does Prestashop 1.7 look like:

Prestashop 1.7 new default homepage

Prestashop 1.7 new default homepage

 

 

 

 

 

Prestashop 1.7 default product page

Prestashop 1.7 default product page

Prestashop 1.7 new default product page

Prestashop 1.7 back office new product edition page

Prestashop 1.7 admin product edition page

Prestashop 1.7 new product edition page

 

Demo website:

A Prestashop demo website is available at ld-prestashop.template-help.com/prestashop_61132/

 

Key figures:

Prestashop 1.7 is:

  • More than 500 native features
  • Translated in more than 25 languages
  • New foundation framework named Symfony
  • New theme system
  • SEO Manager already compatible with Prestashop 1.7

 

Final words on Prestashop 1.7

Don’t get too excited, Prestashop 1.7 is not a revolution. It looks more like an intermediate iteration towards something better. It runs side by side a new php framework and it legacy code and developers have to adapt (I mean rewrite) their modules couple of time in the following months as the technical team behind Prestashop continues its incremental development strategy. It worth to mention that Prestashop 1.6.x will be supprted until October 2018.