PrestaShop 1.3 Theming – Beginner’s Guide (quick review)

[kilwag]

First off, a litle about my background so you can read the review in context.

I'm new to Prestashop. I evaluated four carts before being pleasantly surprised by Presta shop. It really stood out as the best combination of easy to use but full of features compared the other ones I looked at, with the possible exception of Cubecart, but it seems the free versions will be disappearing this upcoming year, so I decided to go with Prestashop.

I have basic php knowledge and no experience working with smarty templates, however I have made a handful of Wordpress themes from scratch. I've been using and modifying Wordpress for a few years and Im comfortable messing around under the hood.

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The Review -

PrestaShop 1.3 Theming – Beginner’s Guide by Hayati Hashim

This book truly is a beginners guide, but the title is misleading. It should be titled "A beginner's guide to customizing Prestashop" as the majority of the book concentrates on beginner's CSS and installing and rearranging modules. In fact, there's only one chapter that specifically deals with the template files, although occasionally other chapters will explain modifying a specific tpl file in conjunction with installing a specific module.

What's missing is a an explanation of the template hierarchy that is essential if you are going to make a new theme in the classic sense of the word instead of just changing some colors around and doing the majority of the design by rearranging modules.

As far as a "Beginners guide to theming", this book is more of an expanded chapter one or two of what a proper theming guide would contain.

That being said, the information in the book will certainly be helpful to a lot of people who want to learn how to customize the look and features of a basic install. I only wish it was more accurately titled. If you're still interested, the electronic copy from the publisher is definitely the way to go on this one. It really doesn't contain much as a reference, and once you read it once you're not likely to refer back to it.