If you are a Prtestashop 1.4 user, now approaching to 1.5, you might have noticed those little arrows you used to move products are not there anymore, where they used to be. This is because products and categories now have 2 different interfaces in the back office. So, how to move products within a category? Well, there is a hidden catch: you must first filter the product list by category. In short terms, here is what you have to do:

1. In the admin panel, hover on Catalog, and click Products.

Click on the products link under Catalog

2. In this page, click “Filter by category”

Click this link to filter products by category

3. Finally, select one category, and the product list will be filtered down to the ones belonging to the selected category. Not only, the movement arrows will also appear in the right side of the table.

Select a category, and use the arrows to move them inside it

That’s it

The post Quick Tip: Move Products inside a Category in Prestashop 1.5 appeared first on NemoPS.

Some words about SSL

If you don’t know what SSL is, or have heard about but don’t grasp the concept, here it is: SSL is a cryptographic protocol, that basically secures data sent across pages with a cryptographic key. It’s basically used to secure credit card transactions, and sensible data like login details, or personal information. In Prestashop, the back office login, front office account pages and orders can be secured with SSL by default. Of course, you can secure other pages if you want, but this is beyond the scope of the quick tip.

Get your certificate first!

Before even thinking on implementing SSL in Prestashop, you must buy an SSL Certificate. It doesn’t come for free in any hosting plan I know, and it has to be bought separately for each domain. This means that if you have myshoes.com, and myshoes.net, 2 SSL Certificates will be needed. Most hosting providers also require you to buy an additional dedicated IP address. Let’s see how to buy an SSL Certificate with a popular and affordable hosting: Arvixe.com.

Setting up an SSL Certificate with Arvixe

I’m using Arvixe, but most of the providers offer about the same way to get an SSL certificate. I’ll also assume your already have a domain, without the SSL Certificate.

First, login to your Arvixe account, and navigate to the Support Center. In the knowledgebase section, you’ll find a link for SSL, with any additional information you may need. You can ask the certificate in many ways: using the live chat (just below Knlowledgebase), sending and email at ssl@arvixe.com, or opening a ticket. The important thing is that you provide the following information:

• Arvixe Username
• Host to make cert for: (usually domain.com or www.domain.com)
• City:
• State:
• Country (2 letter abbreviation):
• Company Name:
• Company Division:

As they state in the knowledgebase, if you already have your own certificate, they’ll install that for FREE.

As for their pricing, the SSL itself is $25.95/year, plus 2 additional bucks per month for the dedicated IP.

Check that the certificate is working

After some time (usually, a couple of days) you’ll receive confirmation of the successful installation of your certificate. it’s time to test it out. Login to your prestashop admin panel, and navigate to Preferences -> General.. The very first option will allow you to test out your new SSL certificate:

Click on Please click here to use HTTPS protocol before enabling SSL.
If everything works out correctly, after the page refreshes your address bar will have https:// at the beginning, with a padlock right in front:

If, for some reason, you can’t access the page (Internal Server Error 500, 404 not found, 102 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED) or anything else) your SSL certificate is not seup correctly. If this happens contact your hosting immediately, since you can’t do anything about it.

Else, if you can display the new page, set Enable SSL to yes, and save.

Troubleshooting

At this point, your content should be secured. Access an account page, and try placing an order in your Prestashop front-office. You should get the https:// prefix for the url.

But this might not happen at times, even though the secure link was okay for your admin page. If you get some new 404, 500, or 102 errors, the only option is to contact the hosting. Let them also know if you use Pretty URLs, as this might conflict at times. A bunch of other issues can be solved anyway.

The page at http://mysitesname.com ran insecure content from http://anotherpage.com/file.ext

This usually happens if some files required in the page are not properly embedded. Most of the times, when you use a custom theme. If you run into this, take note of the file that is being embedded and try to locate it in the html structure. It usually is a javascript, stylesheet of image type file. If you use addthis, for example, you’ll need to include a secured version of their javascript to avoid this error.
If your theme has a slider, you will need to change the prifix for those.

In all cases, when you use SSL, your image/stylesheets/javascripts references MUST begin with {$base_dir_ssl}.

I can’t access my site (back nor front office) anymore!

Your server’s SSL settings might be wrong. In this case, you must force Prestashop not to use SSL. Login to your phpMyAdmin (or any other database manager). Access the configuration table, and locate PS_SSL_ENABLED. It should be set to 1, crush it to zero. This way, you’ll be able to access your site again, but of course you’ll have no SSL. Be sure you further investigate the issue, before trying to turn it on again!

The post Quick Tip: Prestashop SSL (and some troubleshooting) appeared first on NemoPS.

Watch the screencast

Text version

The old VS the new hooks syntax

If you were used to adding hooks to Prestashop 1.4, you might remember having to write something like this

INSERT INTO `ps_hook` (`name`, `title`, `description`) 
VALUES ('category', 'Category', 'Hooks before the product list in a category');	

Into your database to add the hook, and then override one of the controllers to register its execution, like this:

Class FrontController extends FrontControllerCore
{
 
    public function displayHeader()
    {
        if (!self::$initialized)
             $this->init();
 
            self::$smarty->assign('HOOK_CATEGORY', Module::hookExec('category'));
 
        parent::displayHeader();        
    }
 
}

And this was SO bad, forcing us to use overrides for almost every place which didn’t have its own hook already.

Luckily, but “secretly” for some reason, a new and simpler way has been introduced, and that is, substantially, adding this to a template file:

	{hook h='nameOfTheHook'}

I discovered it by chance actually, scrabbing throughout the forums, from a post of one the Prestashop Core’s developers: Fabien Serny (reference)

Example: adding a new hook for the first time

For the sake of this example, we’ll just be writing some piece of text above the footer. Therefore, open up themes/default/footer.tpl, and right before {$HOOK_FOOTER}, add the following

	{hook h='beforeFooter'}	

The name is, of course, discretional. Nothing else has to be done actually, but registering the hook as any other existent hook. Open up any module you have installed, for example blocknewsletter.php. I’ll be using this for demonstrational purposes only, you can use any. At the end of the file, add a simple hooking function:

	
public function hookBeforeFooter($params)
{
	return 'hi there!';
}

The function is now there, but this module is not registered as being part of this hook. We won’t be able to position it to the new hook from the back office yet. The first time you create the hook, it has to be registered at least once, from a module. We can use a regular registerHook for this, as any other hook. In the install() function of the module, add the registration, so it looks like this:

	if (parent::install() == false || $this->registerHook('leftColumn') == false ||  $this->registerHook('beforeFooter') == false || $this->registerHook('header') == false)
		return false;	

Again, this is just an example, the important part is the following one (it will look familiar if you know how to create modules and register hooks; if it doesn’t, have a look at my previous tutorial about Prestashop Hooks, as the basic ideas are still valid):

	$this->registerHook('beforeFooter')

Go back to the modules panel and reset the module (or install it, if it wasn’t). Refresh the front office, and you’ll see the “Hi there!” text appear where it’s supposed to be.

Isn’t this a HUGE improvement? Yay, it is. But if you still use Prestashop 1.4, you can go the old way with my module EZ Hooks, and create new hooks in 1 click.

The post Quick Tip: Adding hooks to Prestashop 1.5 (the new way) appeared first on NemoPS.

Prestashop version: Prestashop 1.5.2. Useful for all 1.5.x so far

Watch the screencast

Text version

Please note that this fix applies up to the latest Prestashop 1.5 version, which, at the time I am writing, is 1.5.2. It’s not needed in Prestashop 1.4.
Go to your admin folder, then themes/default/template/helpers/form/ and open up form.tpl.

At about line 400, you will find some javascript code. Change the following

				theme_advanced_buttons1 : "bold,italic,underline,strikethrough,|,justifyleft,justifycenter,justifyright,justifyfull|cut,copy,paste,pastetext,pasteword,|,search,replace,|,bullist,numlist,|,undo,redo",
				theme_advanced_buttons2 : "link,unlink,anchor,image,cleanup,code,|,forecolor,backcolor,|,hr,removeformat,visualaid,|,charmap,media,|,ltr,rtl,|,fullscreen",
				theme_advanced_buttons3 : "",
				theme_advanced_buttons4 : ""

Into this

				theme_advanced_buttons1 : "newdocument,|,bold,italic,underline,strikethrough,|,justifyleft,justifycenter,justifyright,justifyfull,styleselect,formatselect,fontselect,fontsizeselect",
				theme_advanced_buttons2 : "cut,copy,paste,pastetext,pasteword,|,search,replace,|,bullist,numlist,|,outdent,indent,blockquote,|,undo,redo,|,link,unlink,anchor,image,cleanup,help,code,,|,forecolor,backcolor",
				theme_advanced_buttons3 : "tablecontrols,|,hr,removeformat,visualaid,|,sub,sup,|,charmap,media,|,ltr,rtl,|,fullscreen",
				theme_advanced_buttons4 : "styleprops,|,cite,abbr,acronym,del,ins,attribs,pagebreak",

Of course, these are te default buttons. If you want to add only some of them, you can have a look at the tinyMCE documentation. 

Additional Resources

• Prestashop Module: Rich Text Footer on my addons store
• TinyMCE Documentation

The post Quick Tip – Enable all tinyMCE commands in Prestashop 1.5 appeared first on NemoPS.

Watch the screencast

UPDATE – Fixing Paypal error 500 in Prestashop 1.5

I am just out of a hourly struggle with the Paypal module in 1.5. If you happen to get error 500, and can’t solve it in anyway, it’s mostly due to the url. The paypal module uses the following url to perform the payment (express checkout):

http://mystore.com/modules/paypal/express_checkout/submit.php

And this is BAD, since Prestashop 1.5 uses the following structure:

http://mystore.com/index.php?fc=module&module=modulename&controller=modulecontroller

So, it’s necessary to change the url that points to the first link, into something Presta 1.5 likes, using the second API reference. So! Here is an example if you use express checkout, like the link above.

Go to modules/paypal/views/templates/front/express_checkout/paypal.tpl and change the action of the form with ID paypal_payment_form from

action=""{$base_dir_ssl}modules/paypal/express_checkout/submit.php"

to

action="{$base_dir_ssl}index.php?fc=module&module=paypal&controller=expresscheckoutsubmit"

Again, this is for the one page checkout! If you’re using 5 steps checkout, you will need to edit the links in modules/paypal/views/templates/front/paypal.tpl

Now open up modules/paypal/express_checkout/paypal_express_checkout.php. Go to (approximately) line 223 and change this:

		$fields['RETURNURL'] = PayPal::getShopDomainSsl(true, true)._MODULE_DIR_.$this->name.'/express_checkout/submit.php';

Into this:
 

		$fields['RETURNURL'] = PayPal::getShopDomainSsl(true, true)._PS_DIRECTORY_.'index.php?fc=module&module=paypal&controller=expresscheckoutsubmit';

This way, we ensure Paypal returns to the correct page when coming back to the site and confirming the order.

Text version – How to Debug Prestashop Error 500

Error 500 is a nightmare for every developer, because it doesn’t tell you anything at all about what’s going on. It’s more or less like the scary Blank Page.

If you had this error with Prestashop 1.4, it was probably due to some .htaccess misconfiguration when activating friendly urls, or some folders permissions not set to 0755. However, Prestashop was crystal clear about errors if the display_errors setting in config.inc.php was set to true. But now you already did it, and you also turned on ps_debug_sql! Plus, you are not using any htaccess special configuration, and you are whether set the folders permissions to 0755 or running the store on a local environment. So, what’s the catch?

Prestashop 1.5 comes with some new Exception classes, to help the developer have a better tracking of the errors’ source. Howver, what Prestashop doesn’t tell you, since it does not have a decent user manual, is that you have to enable the development mode to take advantage of the new debugging features.

So, just head to config/ and open up defines.inc.php. Then, set _PS_MODE_DEV_ to TRUE as shown below

define('_PS_MODE_DEV_', true);
define('_PS_DEBUG_PROFILING_', false);
define('_PS_MODE_DEMO_', false);

It should be at line 28.

Now go back to the error page and refresh, you should see something like this (may vary depending of the exception thrown)

In this case, I can now see that a table I’m referencing doesn’t exist.

So, this is everything on how to debug prestashop error 500. Even if you don’t understand a single line of the error above, you might hopefully be able to fix it with your developer (by the way, if you need one, you can hire me!).

The post Quick tip: How to Debug Prestashop Error 500 (1.5) appeared first on NemoPS.

I didn’t have time yet to go through all of the new features. However, since this version is claimed to be “production ready” I’ll start analyzing it right now and I’ll post my first impressions as soon as I know enough about the new software.

The “new” template

I’ve put quotes around new just because it’s the very same design of the latest 1.4 template. The big difference is that it now comes as the default template with Prestashop 1.5. It has of course been improved to adapt to the new features. The Prestashop logo has been replaced by a “Your Logo” fancy text, and there finally is an image slider in the center of the homepage. Yes, Prestashop was kind of missing a basic slider!

Oh, it should also be mobile-friendly, but I haven’t tested this yet. Please comment and correct me if I am mistaken!

The new back office

This change will make a lot of people happy, and another whole lot really sad. Prestashop’s back office was simple to use, and most of the features were laid out in a pretty straightforward way. As always, it’s hard to adapt to a new interface after having had the same one for a lot of time, even with its problems!

With this new layout, it’s finally possible to list all categories or products (and filter these by category!). There is no more need to access a category to edit a product (or search). Just rollover the catalog in the top menu, then product, and filter the ones you want.. There is not yet a feature to bulk edit products, as a side note.

Overall, the blue style looks better than the pinkish-yellowish one, since it seems more professional. It looks like they tried to give the BO more of a Magento style. But as you might know, Magento’s Admin panel is a nighmare, and I have the strong impression that this new interface is far less intuitive than the previous one. It’s also liquid, making it a bit too stretched on large screens (especially if accessedat 1080p!).

“This change will make a lot of people happy, and another whole lot really sad”

By the way, what are the “Taxes” and “Tax Rules” doing under the Localization tab? And, as a final note, the crappy way of setting up a carrier is still the same. i think they should have worked on this!

Orders creation from back office!

Yeah, this really deserves an exclamation mark! I would say Finally! This is the answer to most of the shop owners requests, since it was so(so!) sad not to be able to create orders from the administration panel! It’s easy and quick, fully ajaxified. Should we ask for more?

Prestashop 1.5 biggest addition: The Multistore

The Multistore (or Multishop) feature is probably the biggest change in Prestashop 1.5 in regards of the previous versions, along with being the most advertised, too.

At any rate, we will now be able to manage different shops from a single prestashop installation.

This means that it is now possible to set up 2 different stores with a different configuration each. They’ll have their own logo, theme, products, categories, modules, orders and customers, if not specified that they should share some of these functionalities.

This, however, does not mean that we will be able to set up a ”totally” new shop from the back office. We will have to copy our Prestashop installation to the new server and folder if we plan to use the Multistore on different domains.

Let’s see an example:

I want to have my primary shop (Electronics) on www.coolelectronics.com. Then, I want to have another shop (SportsWear) and I want to be able to manage these 2 from the same admin. Of course, the sportswear shop will not be reached at the same domain as the first shop.  Instead, I’d like it to be at www.coolsportswear.com. What Prestashop doesn’t tell you, is that you will have to physically copy your Prestashop installation to the other domain. Once that is done, you’ll be able to set up the Multistore by setting the new domain name in back office. There is, of course, no need of another database.

Now, let’s say I’m looking far, far away. As an example, let’s assume that I want to create a general store like Amazon, and sell any kind of stuff from garden arches to art supplies. The Multistore functionality would be perfect, since all of the shops would be inside my own domain: www.coolgeneralstore.com.

The Prestashop 1.5 Multistore allows me to do that without having to create subfolders in my domain and place new files there. There is an option, when a store is created, to set up a “Virtual URI”, that will trigger the new shop when reached. So, if my shop is www.coolgeneralstore.com, and I want a separate store for the “outdoors” department, I can set the Virtual URI of the corresponding store to outdoors/. It will then be possible to access that specific shop (again, with its own configuration, modules, catalog and so) by reaching www.coolgeneralstore.com/outdoors.

Anyway, to enable the Multistore let’s go to Preferences -> General and turn on Enable Multistore. Then, under “Advanced Parameters” a new link will appear: Multistore. Let’s click on it, and we’ll be able to add the new store. When doing that, keep in mind the above suggestions!

Conclusion

There would be a lot more to say about this new version, but since this is only an introduction to announce the release, I will stop at this point. I am planning to launch a whole series of tutorials to analyze all the new features in depth,so, as always, stay tuned!

p.s. Of course, DO NOT update your store right now, since there may be (and there shure are) tons of bugs. I think we’ll see 1.5.1 popping out soon enough.

Additional Resources

• Download Prestashop 1.5

The post Prestashop 1.5 Released! (updated) appeared first on NemoPS.