Quick Overview of PrestaShop

Having set up PrestaShop (please see https://devdocs.prestashop-project.org/1.7/basics/installation/, if you haven’t) and used it, you may know the two main parts of it. As with other content management systems (CMSs) such as WordPress, there’s a public part unrestricted and visible by any visitor of your website named the Front Office (FO), and there’s a restricted part, only visible by employees with email and password authentication, called the Back Office (BO).

In this chapter, we will explain quickly how everything is designed, from the database to the core structure of the FO and the BO, and how they are linked.

In this chapter, we will cover the following main topics:

• The data model—how and where data is stored
• The core classes—how the Model-View-Controller (MVC) works

By the end of this chapter, you will know how the database is built, the types of tables, and how the core manages and manipulates entities. You will understand, from a high-level point of view, the MVC structure of FO and BO pages and how some BO pages are being migrated from the legacy-based core to a Symfony-based one.