New to Prestashop - questions & concerns (1.6)

[WalkerX]

Hi

 

I am new to Prestashop but experienced with other CMSs & eCommerce systems and theming.  I want to pick an eCommerce system and stick with it, knowing it will be fast, reliable and easy to change.  I want to recommend it to all my clients, and implement only Prestashop only and forget about other systems.

 

Some questions:

 

Theme - easily moving elements to their own 100% widths:

 

With both OpenCart and Magento, I was able to theme everything in my first session with each of them after installing them for the first time.  They have other problems, but were easy to theme.  I did not find that to be the case with Prestashop.  I am sure that the PS team have imlemented the latest frameworks specifically to make it easy, but I must need help doing simple things.  With OpenCart and Magento, I just cut the element I want to move, put it where I want, wrap it in a div and style - done.  I cannot figure out how to do the same thing in PS.

 

For example, see the attached image of a layout.  I have copied the default store to a new template, and I simply need key elements to be separated so they can have their own 100% width backgrounds (eg, top menu; custom HTML etc).  I guess I just need to know how to take an element/widget (eg. top menu; cart; loginj; custom HTML - whatever) and put it wherever I want.  This is a simple 100% background layout for each section, but I found nothing to help me achieve this in PS 1.6.  I know how to achieve this with HTML and CSS - it is simple.  It is understanding how to get the widgets inside of them.  Is this a simple matter of Bootstrap?  Or is it a back-end function somewhere?  If someone could take a look at the layout and let me know what key knowledge I need to separate elements into their own divs/positions. and swaps/change feature sto other places.  I'm definitely missing something simple.

 

Admin area

 

- Cross-promotion:  I want the team at PS to make as much money as possible and get bigger and better, but for designers that want to deliver it to clients, it is a problem when there are competitor theme and functional extension promotions in their client's face seducing them when using the backend - the designer/developer could get cut out of his/her own project or questioned over their choices.  Plus it makes the admin area look very busy and cluttered and like an adertisement.  Is there a way to disable this clutter for the aforementioned reasons?

 

Slow Speed

 

I know slowness-related questions would have been asked ad nauseum, so if you could please direct me to a post that answers these issues with a proven list of configs to implement to solve this.  I am worried about slowness.

 

PrestaShop.com itself - slow and 504 Gateway timeouts

 

Your actual website is very slow for me, and I have fast internet in a major city.  Furthermore, the forum goes offline for me.  Last night, for example, I had to cease my research into theming and go to bed because your forum was down (nginx 504 gateway time-out every page - all other websites fine).  Could you please let me know if there are known issues here.  I am particularly concerned because it looks like you've integrated the admin with your own website - so if that goes down, then client admins go down.  This is the other major reason I want to disable 'live feeds' or 'connections' from Prestashop.com.  They need to be completely separate.

 

 

I'm tired of being let down by eCommerce systems.  I really want Prestashop to be the one I run with and drop the others, and just promote Prestashop to everyone.

 

Any help with the above issues would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks.