Running a business on line is not simple. E-merchants have reported here and there lots of white screen pages. Without a proper version management mechanism, you may end up installing module that is not compatible with your actual instance of Prestashop; example Prestashop 1.7 modules on a Prestashop 1.6 website. When you are running a web store powered by Prestashop, there are these moments you run into trouble and you may want to get the error messages. By detail, Prestashop turns off the display of error messages. Enabling the error reporting mode will display the message only when the admin requires it not to the customers.

Turning on the debug mode in Prestashop 1.6 is relatively easy.
Use an FTP client to log into your host. Filezilla is a good one.
Navigate to the root folder of Prestashop.
Locate the file defines.inc.php in the folder config.
Download the file into your local computer
Use a text editor like Nodepad ++
Open up the file defines.inc.php and find the line of code that states

define(‘_PS_MODE_DEV_’, false);

Change it to :
define(‘_PS_MODE_DEV_’, true);

You can now see the error messages in the browser when they occur.
Eventually, you would need to de-activate all the performance option like (Combine, Compress, Cache), Force Smarty compilation. Doing so, any change will be take into account immediately and you will be looking at the actual state of your shop not a cache version of the files.

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