Top 6 PrestaShop Development Mistakes Which Can Destroy Your Project

PrestaShop has turned to be one of the best eCommerce platforms available for businesses today. To keep it as simple as possible for the merchants and users, it has to encapsulate quite a lot of complexities within it. To ensure things goes well that way businesses need to hire PrestaShop developer who can keep things going through coding.

The PrestaShop software architecture asks for standards and best practices. Most of the time, these practices are ignored knowingly or unknowingly which leads to issues in the development.

There are a number of mistakes which can seriously affect your development if not handled properly. Such kind of mistakes has been mentioned here:

• Not enabling the development mode

Here we are talking about a PrestaShop website in development mode. During the development phase it is important to keep the development mode on. By taking this step, it will ensure that if there is any error or warning on the site, you will be able to catch it easily.

• Inefficient testing

Testing the project is inevitable and every developer needs to carry out it. Sometimes it cannot be sure that the developed module will work seamlessly with the PrestaShop modules which are standard. Online store merchants use modules from different developers and there can come situation where one module may not work with another one. This can create an issue. Most of the developers offer free support for a fixed time, so it would be better to get the issues fixed within that time period.

• Directly modifying the core files

It is not recommended for the PrestaShop developers to do it directly. In case a developer is new in the PrestaShop community chances are more that he may be not aware of PrestaShop overrides which can modify the core file. Again going for this option is easier as it does not disturb the core code structure of PrestaShop. It is always better to use the override rather than working with the codes.

• Improper or insufficient comments

It is a professional practice for developers to add comments to the code. Adding comments to codes as well as modifications is important. It will help other developers to understand the changes or reasons to write that particular code there. Moreover, if you are looking at the codes after a long time then you will be able to understand it.

• Database queries directly from the controller

It is true that PrestaShop follows the MVC structure. Running the database queries from the controller is not considered a good practice and is not even included in the structure. Whenever you want to query the database make use of class. This will add up the task to create a new file but, it will ensure that the code is clean and you can maintain it easily.

• Using style tag directly within templates

This is not at all a recommended approach. You should follow the standard coding style in PrestaShop. It comes with ‘AddJS’ and ‘AddCSS’ for including JavaScript and CSS so better make use of it.

References

• https://www.prestashop.com/forums/topic/504116-10-mistakes-to-avoid-in-prestashop-development/
• http://www.savecontactform7.com/top-10-mistakes-while-coding-a-prestashop-module
• https://medium.com/prestashopindia/common-design-mistakes-that-hamper-user-experience-in-prestashop-d3296ad0eb4d