As you may have noticed Prestashop is no longer an independent company. The last two years it has been part of a bigger company. This company increasingly pushes to get more revenue from Prestashop. The advertising on this forum is the most visual symptom of that.
Another symptom is that there are now two versions of Prestashop 8.1.1 to download. On the Prestashop website you can download the "PRESTASHOP EDITION BASIC" with a size of 114 MB. On Github you can download a version of 80 MB.
The difference is that the "Edition Basic" contains 11 modules extra. Here is an overview:
- commercial partners (klaviyopsautomation, ps_checkout, psxmarketingwithgoogle, ps_facebook, mbeshipping)
- gamification
- ps_mbo: Marketplace in the Back Office: the second entry in the admin Modules menu.
- ps_accounts: leads your login via the Prestashop website. Problematic when you need to have more than one login account ("employee"). When you find yourself unable to update other modules ("Could not perform action update for module undefined") this module may be outdated. You can circumvent this module by clicking on the small link to an "other" login method.
- ps_edition_basic: I am not sure what it is for. It is not important. It is a major source of problems as it requires PHP 8.1 and thus torpedoes compatibility with older PHP versions.
In PS 8.1.5 and 8.1.6 you may see just after the installation a warning that ps_edition_basic needs to be updated. In my case I chose to do that and the call failed. I suspect that it somehow requires you to have an account on the Prestashop website. Unfortunately I don't know an url where you could download this module in order to install it yourself. In the Modules page in the backoffice the module is not marked as needing an upgrade. Anyway, you can click the warning away and use th shop without upgrading the module.
- ps_eventbus: this is some software library for sequencing tasks. It is used by other modules, including ps_facebook. For that reason removing is not recommended. It creates a ps_eventbus_incremental_sync database table that can grow very big and may need to be truncated sometimes. Search the forum for more info.
- ps_metrics: provides some statistics and info about your shop. This is a Prestashop service. The first month is free. After that you have to pay.
- psassistant: this module was added in 8.1.2 a few weeks after the version had been introduced (yes, Prestashop make small changes to a release in the course of time). I don't know what it does.
The core version of Prestashop is maintained by the Prestashop project with Github https://github.com/PrestaShop. The extra modules are maintained by the Prestashop company with Github https://github.com/PrestaShopCorp
If anyone has additional information, please write here below.
If you want to install Prestashop with older PHP versions you should either take the Github version or take the Edition Basic version and allow it to fail the first time. You can then delete the ps_edition_basic module under the Modules directory and then click the link to retry the installation.