To anyone who has successfully created a PrestaShop theme.

[nuclearholocausto]

Can you give us newbies an essential guide as to what languages we need to learn to take full advantage of the PrestaShop system in terms of creating themes.

Is learning Smarty essential?

Do you have an IDE preference?

[WDSY]

Yes learn smarty - If you know basic PHP its easy to pick up.
Then get a good text editor - I use Notepad++ but you may want to get one with smarty syntax highlighting supported
Good luck

[nuclearholocausto]

Okay thanks. Will try to decipher Smarty. Any suggested books on this topic?

[CalloSmart]

Can you give us newbies an essential guide as to what languages we need to learn to take full advantage of the PrestaShop system in terms of creating themes.

Is learning Smarty essential?

Do you have an IDE preference?

Hi

I have over 13 years of software development in Microsoft based software development technologies. But I am a newbie to PHP and especially to Prestashop framework. I am learning the framework and in the process, started to write a series of posts(Creating a Prestashop 1.4 theme from scratch) to outline the creation of a new Prestashop theme using Visual Studio and other tools. The posts primarily are targeted towards a PHP/Prestashop newbie.

Please visit Creating a Prestashop 1.4 theme from scratch and share my experiences through my learning phase. I hope active participation from other novice Prestashop programmers like me and advices from Prestashop experts to make the posts helpful for others who require it.

[nuclearholocausto]

Thanks CalloSmart! This looks really promising. Since VS. PHP is only available for 30-trial, I'll wait until you have finished with the tutorial. I'm currently using Dreamweaver for editing PHP, HTML, and CSS. The only drawback at the moment is the lack of smarty integration.

[wildchief]

Thanks CalloSmart! This looks really promising. Since VS. PHP is only available for 30-trial, I'll wait until you have finished with the tutorial. I'm currently using Dreamweaver for editing PHP, HTML, and CSS. The only drawback at the moment is the lack of smarty integration.

Hello,

Both netbeans and notepad++ are free and they support code highlighting for .tpl files which is helpful for buidling themes

I use them here for this theme creation guide Prestashop Theme guide

for notepad++ you need to follow this little bit of advice

http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus/forums/forum/331753/topic/3461840

[nuclearholocausto]

hellooooo wildchief!
thanks for the reply!, i haven't tried your tutorial yet but so far it's the most down and dirty, easy to follow tuts i've seen in this forum. will be installing either netbeans and/or notepad++ and decide which one to keep. i just hope you get the time to finish it so us PS template creator wannabes can get on the bandwagon soon!!! thanks again!

[Mark Hesketh]

Just wanted to say a huge thank you to Callo for your guide.

I'm a web developer myself, and have created a number of PrestaShop stores pre-1.4, but its been very much sticky taped together. Been scratching my head with some of Presta's hidden functionality, and the proper use of overrides etc.

Your posts really highlighted a number of things for me, and I'm currently setting up NetBeans to work as an IDE while I work on my latest 1.4 project.

So thanks a lot!