How to develop showcase website

[olator]

Dear community,

I'm new to prestashop and have a project of e-commerce for a client that I think about developing on prestashop. It is a B2B shop the company has many feature they want regaarding the shop the sales, paiment options, multilingual, international, .... This is why I thought about prestashop.
The company wants also to redevelop and integrate there showcase web site that present the company, the history, their image...... For sur they want something modern and very catchy, with a hand made design, paralax animation, 3D objects,....

At first look Prestashop seems very limited regarding developing that part, and I don't know Prestashop well enough to see how difficult would that be. Can I have your thoughs, what are the options?

Thank you very much

[Piotr3qx]

Hi

I agree with you that Prestashop looks difficult to customize visually. The default theme looks ugly and the paid templates do not impress with their modernity and ux implementations. 

But as a developer, who build a few custom themes (from scratch) I can tell you, that it is both complicated and simple at the same time.

The main problem that you will face is to create modules for displaying stuff on homepage. Presta has build in modules but they are limitaed. For example - if you want to show a blocks of categories, you either buy a module or build a custom module (which is not that difficult). There is one bad thing about buying modules - they inject a lot of unnecessary code. Then you have to customize these modules to your own needs (for example change styles of buttons, change styles of product miniatures)

You should also have some knowledge of how modules are displayed. Presta has a lot of hooks to which modules can be attached. For example if your header contains logo on the left, menu in a center and cart icon with account icon on the right - in the header file you should create hooks in the appropriate places / tags (<div> etc), and then hook the modules to these hooks. It can be tricky with pages like category or product.

Another thing to mention is the knowledge of smarty template engine. Presta uses smarty for displaying content. You should know how to extend files and override block content of them.

The common practise in PrestaShop is to use framework like bootstrap, it helps you a little bit with amount of components and pages you need to style.

So, if you want a really modern, nice shop with high UX you should always create your custom theme from scratch. Is it difficult? For the first time - yes but if you build few of them then it's like building normal HTML/CSS/JS site

[olator]

Ok thank you for your reply.

Well let say I need to make a few custom page where there is almost no content related to product, only images, textes and so on. CMS feature to create page is definitly not enough powerfull. Is there any way to do in my theme, pages, where I'm totally free on the style and for which I can edit content text and images from the admin, use the translation feature? Indeed I need for this project to create 3 pages related to the company, to describe the company, tell it's history, present the people of the company, ....

Some people suggest to do it with wordpress and to have a separate shop. My question is is there a way to do it also with prestashop so that I only have one plateform. Some existing pluging to manage the CMS part, maybe and enable my front développer to do nice presentation?

 

[Piotr3qx]

Presta let you create a file, for example page-12.tpl (same way as you would do in wordpress) and hard code page in this file. Then you can create translations for text and images. 

Of course there is an option with WordPress, to create these pages in Gutenberg and then via REST API fetch content of these pages. The downsides of this solution are: you have to create second CMS with good Gutenberg experience and because of content fetching, your site can slow down. 

Unfortunatelly there is no such thing in Presta like Gutenberg Editor for easy customization.

In my experience, pages like about us, history, contact are not updated very often. So I would probably hard code them and let developer make changes in the future.

Another thing to mention, you should have a graphic desing of these pages, to know what you have to code. Blind coding will get you headache.

 

Edited February 22, 2022 by Piotr3qx (see edit history)