Practical Module Development for Prestashop 1.7: A practical guide to creating modern Prestashop modules and bringing your online store to next level

Extend PrestaShop 1.7/8.x features by creating various useful modern Symfony-based modules, learning how to customize themes, and getting ready to solve most online sellers' issues

Key Features

• Understand the data and object architecture of the legacy and new Symfony core of PrestaShop
• How to create modules the modern way in order to add great features such as content blocks, payment options, or carriers to your store
• Learn how to customize themes and override existing modules templates

Book Description

Since version 1.7, PrestaShop began its migration from the old legacy core to a brand new Symfony-based system. This implies many changes for developers starting from maintenance to module development, and that’s all this book is about. With a quick explanation of the data structure, you will be presented the architecture of the system from front-office to back-office controllers (migrated or not) and you will learn how hooks work and enable modules to customize and improve the CMS. Mastering the mechanics is a prerequisite for a good understanding of how modules embed in the system.

Then, you will dive into the creation of seven useful modules under a practical and progressive approach being explained the structure of a module, hooks registration, the creation of front-office controllers, and Symfony back-office controllers in a modern way. We'll do this by using Doctrine entities, services, grids, and forms, finishing with payment and carrier modules. Finally, you will discover how to override and customize a theme in order to make your e-commerce store look just like you need from templating to assets management.

By the end of this book, you will be able to provide modern solutions with Prestashop that meet clients' tailor-made and challenging business needs.

What you will learn

• Understand the structure of PrestaShop's core
• Learn what are hooks and their function
• Create a hello world module
• Create modules to display blocks on the front office with styles
• Create a module to add fields to the category pages and manage them
• Create a full blogging module with front and back-office modern controllers
• Create payment and carrier modules to improve the selling experience
• Customize a theme by creating a child theme

Who This Book Is For

If you are a junior or advanced PHP developer already using PrestaShop as a simple user willing to know more or to solve online sellers' problems by creating modules as a professional, this book is definitely for you. In order to learn from this book, you should have a basic knowledge of the Symfony framework. This book will be a really good help for the module developers expecting to move from the old legacy environment to the modern one. Other CMS developers can use that book as a tool to compare and move to PrestaShop.

Table of Contents

1. Quick Overview of PrestaShop
2. The configuration and initialization
3. The Front Office
4. The backoffice
5. The hooks
6. The theme
7. What are modules ? Let’s create a hello world !
8. A reinsurance block module
9. A customer callback request module
10. A category page extension module
11. A simple blogging module
12. A cash payment module
13. A drive delivery module
14. How to create a child theme
15. Override some templates
16. Assets compiling with webpack

Louis Authie is a freelance full stack developer with over 25 years of experience in PHP. He graduated from the ENAC, Toulouse, France in 2011 as an engineer and from the CNAM Paris, France as an analyst programmer in 2017. Since 2012, he's been developing/maintaining modules and themes from various versions of PrestaShop. Becoming an associate in a label-natural bedding e-shop in 2016 improved his awareness of online sellers' challenges. In 2019, he started contributing to the PrestaShop open-source project, first on documentation, then on back-office migration and bug fixes. Louis also teaches professionals in PHP, WordPress, PrestaShop, and Symfony development as a consultant trainer.