The road from Zen Cart to Prestashop

[jimmywhite]

Hello everyone!
After a few years with Zen Cart, i am looking to change it with Prestashop as i have read many good things about it. The one thing i am really concern with is the fact that upgrading PS seems to be a titan task, according to a post i read on thi forum. I am already used to winmerging files for my ZC upgrades, is Prestashop that difficult to understand?

[poshook]

Presta is easy with powerfull modular system with a lot of excellent modules for free. I was on OpenCart which was very very fast and clean but with less option and thirth party support

[jimmywhite]

Thanks, I'm a bit worried about the support on the forums, for Zen Cart the forum is a real treasure and people are very helpful. But then Presta has many of the add-on modules of ZC already incorporated in the standard installation, not to mention the cleaner canonicalization. I think I'll try Presta for my next project and see how it goes.

[theme_designer]

It's not recommending to move from one shopping cart system to another, because this will mostly harm your keywords rankings.

[Maksym]

It's not recommending to move from one shopping cart system to another, because this will mostly harm your keywords rankings.

It won't be a problem if you do everything right.

jimmywhite, in case you need to migrate database (products, categories, customers, orders etc.), I suggest you to take a look at Cart2Cart. This is shopping cart migration service which enables you to migrate data between 24 most popular shopping cart fast, accurate and safe!

[jhnstcks]

Upgrading the Prestashop version isnt as bad as people make out, depending on how much customisation of the code there is.

I upgraded a 1.3.1 presta to a 1.4 installation a couple of days back and basically just over-wrote the files then ran the install and upgraded the database. Apart from having to upload the files it only took a few seconds to upgrade.

If you use the translations tool in the admin>tools>translations tab of your BO to change wording on your site rather than changing them directly in the files, you can move the translations over to the new install.

Third party modules and themes generally work pretty well with the newer versions of presta, so they can be easily moved into the upgraded versions. Although modules and themes that were created for v1 probabaly need a bit of work to get them working.

I have a Zencart site currently running at the moment and theres a few tools on there that i think would be really useful in Prestashop; Sale Maker, and the ability to modify the front-end layout being just two of them.