This book covers how to develop different modules for PrestaShop 1.6. It will walk you through the widely used best practices and empower you to use these methods while developing various features in PrestaShop. This book will help you create powerful and scalable modules, thereby improving the performance of your shop.
Throughout the course of this book, you will be introduced to a number of clear, practical examples of PrestaShop concepts (such as hooks) in the form of a tutorial. You will also get acquainted with the best practices of PrestaShop, which will greatly reduce the probability of introducing errors in your future modules.
By the end of this book, you will be accustomed with PrestaShop best practices and the important concepts to make a great module.
Chapter 1, Creating a New Module, covers the first step of module creation. This chapter introduces you to a small module example with a simple configuration form.
Chapter 2, Hooks, presents the concept of hooks in PrestaShop, including how they work and how they can be used to interact with the software. The use of the database class is also covered with practical examples.
Chapter 3, Using Context and its Methods, introduces you to the many methods available in PrestaShop, such as the multilingual function or JS/CSS manager.
Chapter 4, Building Module Updates, introduces you to the native module update system. Some extra functional tips are also revealed.
Chapter 5, Front Controllers, Object Models, and Overrides, presents the main design patterns of PrestaShop and explains how to use them to construct a well-organized application.
Chapter 6, Admin Controllers and Hooks, explains how to create new administration tools, use the helper to build forms or an object list, and how to use the hooks available in the administration panel.
Chapter 7, The Carrier Module, introduces you to the creation of a module carrier. Some advanced features such as delivery point handling are also covered.
Chapter 8, The Payment Module, introduces you to the creation of a payment module. An example of creating a payment API is covered.
Chapter 9, Multistore, covers the main guidelines to make your module compliant with the multistore native PrestaShop feature.
Chapter 10, Security and Performance, explains the best practices to make your module secure and efficient.
Appendix, Native Hooks, gives a description of all the hooks that PrestaShop offers.
The modules written in these chapters are all based on PrestaShop 1.6, so you will require what's listed on the PrestaShop standard requirements list, which is available at http://doc.prestashop.com/display/PS16/What+you+need+to+get+started. The requirements are as follows:
PHP v5.2 or higher
MySQL v5.0 or later
It would be better if you work with Unix hosting, Apache Web Server 1.3 or later, with at least 64 MB of RAM dedicated to PHP
This book is intended for web application developers working with PrestaShop who want to increase the efficiency of their shop. It is assumed that you have some experience with PHP and are familiar with coding OOP methods.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Open the modules directory in the root of the PrestaShop directory, then create a new directory and name it with the technical name we chose: mymodcomments."
A block of code is set as follows:
<?php
class MyModComments extends Module
{
}New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The module is now a working module; you can install it by clicking on the Install button."
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