PrestaShop

James Gray — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 15:52:00 +0000

Helping people overcome the challenges of building and growing an online business is what the PrestaShop open-source ecommerce platform is all about. The significant PrestaShop 1.7 release provides innovations focused on three themes: sell faster, create easier and code better.

PrestaShop 1.7 users will sell faster due to the entirely redesigned UX that helps merchants with the daily management of their stores via more effective back-office management and a drastically reduced time to place products online. PrestaShop 1.7 users will create easier with new features like the starter theme, a simple and flexible tool with all the functionality needed to design the perfect store. The starter theme gives web designers significant opportunity for creativity and customization. Finally, PrestaShop 1.7 users will code better with the incorporation of new tools and standards, including the popular Symfony framework and PHP 7 compatibility. The goal is to improve site performance and code security as well as to facilitate better development.

PrestaShop 1.7 is already available in 25 languages and through community crowdsourcing, it gradually will be available in many more.

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The Path to Commerce Kickstart 2.0

Ryan Szrama — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 17:06:47 +0000

by Ryan Szrama

Editor's note: Drupal Commerce Kickstart 2.0 was released yesterday after much testing and perfecting, and the article below describes part of that path in the words of its lead developer, Ryan Szrama. Commerce Kickstart is a bundled Drupal solution that allows a site builder to get up and running with an ecommerce site fairly quickly, including Drupal core, Drupal Commerce and dependent modules, and pre-configured options.

“Commerce Kickstart 2.0 takes all of the core strengths of our flexible eCommerce framework, Drupal Commerce, and makes it easier to use and quicker to deploy for e-retailers,” said Mike O'Connor, president for North America of Commerce Guys. “Leveraging an open-source technology with an engaged community like Drupal was a huge asset when shaping the beta product into what Commerce Kickstart is today.”

With more than 2650 reported active sites just since the August beta release, you'd be in good company giving Drupal Commerce Kickstart a try. And, now that the world isn't going to end, what better time is there to launch that online store you've always wanted?

One of the challenges we faced early on in Drupal Commerce’s development was a complicated installation process. Drupal Commerce was developed on Drupal 7 during its "unstable" tag cycle and depended on three other major contributed modules—Entity API, Rules, and Views—that were still in development. Drupal Commerce was also the first major contributed project to put the new entity and fields systems in Drupal core to the test. Using these systems during an ad hoc installation to define data types often failed.

Our solution to the difficulties developers faced was to introduce an installation profile called Commerce Kickstart that simply installed Drupal 7, Drupal Commerce and all its dependencies during the normal Drupal installation process. Kickstart performed a minor amount of store configuration and demo content creation, but it was still largely a tool for developers. It made it simple to test a barebones installation of Drupal Commerce, which accelerated the project's adoption by seasoned Drupal developers and companies.

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