Developer documentation and theming docs

[Guest]

Hello,

Is there any idea when these might be released.. they have been "coming soon" for longer than soon. Or then I have misunderstood the word soon.

Specially the theme development would be great, there are plenty of stuff available for smarty templates in the system. But rather would not want to go through every controller to see what is assigned. And no point saying use the default theme and style it. Would be just silly to do so (need to scrap dublicate code alot is a start) and it does not fit all purposes for me or for some other developers need. And it does not provide all the needed information there is hidden in the variables, or even what variables get passed and where.

I know I can search google for all neat info. And will use them, but prestashop team should really do something for this.

Br,
Timo

[Mark Hesketh]

Seconded, I've been waiting on this information a long time. To the point where I'm really considering beginning my own wiki-style documentation maintained as a community effort, as soon as I have some time for personal projects.

Information for developers has been thin on the ground since I started using PrestaShop around 2 years ago.

Thank god for some people on these forums, some stuff would have been a complete mystery!

Edit:
Following on from this I've just found this fantastic article you may want to take a look at:
http://blogs.callosmart.com/2011/02/03/creating-a-prestashop-1-4-theme-from-scratch/

[Guest]

I think the developers should slow down now, the latest release was not even close to par and concentrate on supporting the future development outside the prestashop team. The documentation would be important for this. From personal experience, wrote quite big module for client. I had to fallback for normal php functions and functionalities as I had no clue if prestashops own function library has something for me in stock.

Oh well, they made few good additions to 1.4. One was the overrides possibility. Now I'm building a template, and cause of the awfull markup of the xhtml. And it is restricted really badly, without using overrides. I cannot position anything where I would like to have them. The hooks system is too static, I need to hack each module to position them correctly where I want. And obviously to keep update possibility, I need to create new copy of each. The static hooks are bad, really bad bad bad. If person adds new hook and wants to set some block there. Do all the work manually, not all of people know php and lack of documentation does not help them neither.

Unfortunately I might be going to other direction now, to somewhere I can actually have freedom of what I do. Just the ridiculous part was that I need set right column hook always to footer.tpl as it is restricted in the core. Override obviously helps here, but that is just silly. Just the template calls :( tried to set breadcumb to header.tpl, but it does not work there directly. I dont want to do gazillion duplicate calls just to get breadcrumb to work. And obviously this would mean that I need to redesign my layout a bit, not a bit but lot. Actually would require to call sidebar in each own tpl where the breadcumb is.

Sorry for the rant, but I'm not the only one facing these problems. Prestashop team should take some responsibility, slow down and do the documentation. I believe the system is good at this point for many shops. You dont need push out new versions like google chrome does. You are not in a hurry, hurrying just leads to bad code and design.