PrestaShop 1.3 Theming - Beginner's Guide: Develop flexible, powerful, and professional themes for your PrestaShop store through simple steps

http://www.Homology.com—Using "carousels" for products and footer links, the designer has also managed to make a unique look.

http://www.peugeotsport-store.com/—An example of a minimalistic approach in changing the default theme but the end result is good. Here, the designer maintained the three columns of the default template and played around keeping a limited color on the blocks and integrated a flash file at the home page center column.

http://www.dakoyo.fr—This site is also using the three column layout, just like the default theme. There is a use of flash slide in the home page center column, and the image gallery viewer does make a lot of difference, even if most of the basic structure is retained.

http://www.lookforlook.com—By changing the home page logo picture with a flash slide show, a "carousel" on featured products, and using a top menu bar, a footer, and so on, the theme looks very different from the default theme.

PrestaShop directory —This is where the default directory is located in your server. It can be blank if the default directory is at the root of your public HTML folder, whereas, in the example, a new directory named prestash was created when installing the software.

Enable Shop —You set the enable or the activated state for your shop or if it is already deactivated.

Maintenance IP —You specify the IP address allowed to access the Front Office even if the shop is disabled.

Enable SSL —Enabled or disabled depending on If your hosting provider allows SSL, you can activate SSL encryption (https://) for customer account identification and order processing.

Increase Front Office security —This states, Enable or disable token on the Front Office in order to improve PrestaShop security

Friendly URL —Enable only if your server allows URL rewriting (recommended). This feature will require a creation of an .htaccess file.

Back Office help boxes —Enable yellow help boxes which are displayed under form fields in the Back Office. This can be set to yes or no.

Terms of service —When you design the site, you need to decide if customers are required to accept or decline terms of service before their order will be processed. Terms of service are used to prevent legal problems.

Offer gift-wrapping —If you enable this, gift-wrapping suggestions will be offered to the customer, and the customer will be able to leave a message to be printed alongside the order.

Gift-wrapping price —This sets a price for gift-wrapping.

Gift-wrapping tax —This sets a tax for gift wrapping.

Offer recycled-packaging —If you like, you can also suggest recycled packaging to customer.

Cart re-display at login —If enabled, the contents of the user's last shopping cart will be recalled and displayed upon the next time the user logs in.

Round mode —You can choose the rounding of prices, rounding always superior, inferior or classical rounding.

Automatically check updates to modules —New modules and updates are displayed on module page.

Timezone —You can also set the timezone of the store. Currently, it is quite exhaustive, and includes almost every available zone such as Africa, America, Asia, Europe, Pacific, Australia, Chile, Indian, Canadan and the GMT, PST, and so on.

v1.1 theme compatibility —If enabled, the shop will use a PrestaShop v1.1 theme (SSL will generate warnings in the customer's browser).

Contact: Go to Back Office | Preferences | Contact. Here you will get to set the Shop name, Shop e-mail which will be used to contact the administrator, you can fill in your shop Registration information here, along with the Shop address, Country, Phone, and Fax number. However, the only required fields are the top two, that is, the Shop name and the Shop e-mail address.

Appearance : The sub items in the Appearance section are for selecting your Header logo and Favicon. This is the most important stub to control the appearance of your site. Click on Back Office | Preferences | Appearance | Themes and you can see the thumbnail of the theme applied to your shop. By default, we only have one theme choice, that is, prestashop. If you have more than one theme installed, you will see more thumbnails next to the default theme. You will be able to change the Header logo and Favicon through this tab as well.

If you have added a new theme, it will be displayed next to the PrestaShop theme thumbnail in the Themes section, as shown in the preceding screenshot. For PrestaShop 1.3 and above, a new item is added on this page where a link Live from PrestaStore! is provided for purchasing readymade themes.

Meta-Tags : Click on each of the "edit" icons (the pencil-like icon on the right) and edit the meta tags of each page. If you need to add a new meta tag for a different page, just add a new page and proceed with editing the page title, meta description, and meta keywords.

Products : The Products sub tab is important as it sets how the products are featured on your store. Here you can choose how your products are displayed in the front office.

Email: Use this setting to determine how the e-mails are sent by the back office (through the PHPmail() function or through an SMTP server).

Image: This can be used to customize the different sizes used by PrestaShop to display your images and regenerate all your thumbnails.

Here, the next action will be to either add a new type of thumbnail, and set the width and height of it, or you can edit the existing thumbnails (for example, small, medium, and so on) and decide which type of thumbnails (to refer the thumbnail and specific height and width of each type of thumbnails) should be applied to either Products, Categories, Manufactures, Suppliers, and Scenes.

Database: This sub-item sets the server, database, prefix, username, and password. This is related to the config/settings.inc.php file. This configures the connection settings between PrestaShop and its MySQL database.

PDF: The PDF sub-item sets the encoding for any PDF invoices and the font used in the PDF invoices. The language setting by default is English.

Localization: Strangely, the Localization sub-item only allows you to specify the weight unit of the store. In most cases the weight unit will be kg.

Search: The Search setting allow site visitor to search for words which are based on your configuration here. For example, if you're looking for "a large box of dark chocolate", it will only search for "large" and "chocolate", as the other words are less commonly searched for Depending on this configuration setting, you can set the minimum word length to be two characters, as the value three means that only words of four characters or longer, whereas the value two allows the user to search for three character words.

Tracking provides a snapshot of what is empty, disabled, and out of stock categories.

Manufacturers tab is where you can edit information of their products, add new manufacturers, or insert their logos

Suppliers tab is similar to manufacturers, except that the suppliers' information fields do not include address information like the manufacturers' do.

Attributes and groups tab is where you can find out the attributes of a group. For example, you can add colors as one of the attributes.

Features tab will allow more information to be provided to the visitors for valuable comparison on the products' features.

Image mapping allows a pop-up to appear displaying a brief description of the product when customer hovers over the image with the mouse. When clicked, it opens to the product's full product page. This relates to Preferences | Image, which we explained in the previous section where image thumbnails are generated according to the size specified.

Languages—This tab is where you set the language interface. The default languages included in the PrestaShop pack are English and French. You can add new languages and set the default language option here.

Translations —Here you can modify translations, import or export language packs, or copy data from one language to another.

Tabs —Here you get to see a list of all the tabs you used in your store's back office admin. It also indicates the parent or child tab. You can add or delete new items here, or move them to the left or right according to your preferences.

Quick Accesses —Here you decide whether to make a page open in a new window or not. This is more for the admin tools.

Aliases —This can be used to assist with searching when a site visitor keys in a particular word. It is particularly useful for items which may be typed in wrongly, but yet you have the product in your listing.

Import —You can efficiently upload categories, products, attributes, customers addresses, suppliers, and manufacturers data in a .CSV file to expedite your logistics.

Subdomains —Cookies are different on each sub domain of your website. If you want to use the same cookie, please add the sub domains used by your shop. The most common is subdomain www.

DB backup —Back up your files often to make sure you don't lose information if something happens to your hosting.

CMS —This one is particularly useful in theming, as it is also makes the pages linkable to the modules or buttons you create on your home page. The listing in this CMS relates to the Footer link module. When configuring the Footer link module, links you checked (selected) in the particular module will appear at the bottom of your page in the footer block (if you are using the default theme).

Generators —This is useful for generating .htaccess and a robot file, especially related to SEO. You need to have access to your server host to create the necessary thing before generating this.