Preface

Since version 1.7, PrestaShop began its migration from the old legacy core to a brand new Symfony-based system, this has resulted in many changes for developers, from maintenance to module development, and that’s what this book is all about.

The 16 chapters are grouped into 3 sections, each of which can be read individually. Feel free to go directly to what you need; there are no rules! However, it is best to read everything if you want to get the big picture of the system.

The first section explains how the legacy and the Symfony core work together and explores the main components of PrestaShop. There, we use many reverse engineering analyses. Even if it can be tough sometimes, the general idea is to show us how and where to search into the core objects so as to be able to find answers and go further.

The second section explains how to create various types of modules, with many hands-on examples. This practical approach will enable us to face most of our everyday requests from the simplest Hello World! to a full blogging module. Carrier and payment modules are also covered.

The third section provides the best practices and solutions to customize the themes and graphical parts of PrestaShop: child theme creation, module template and asset overrides, and asset bundling with Webpack.

As you can see, many aspects of PrestaShop are covered in this book, and our method is different from the general feature listings available in the developers’ documentation. The main target is to provide a practical approach with examples, which is lacking on the web or in the multiple available sources of information.

I hope you will enjoy your journey into the PrestaShop development world and that this book will become a useful toolbox!