Prestashop 1.7 : On the road to success

Prestashop 1.7 is on the road to become the best e-commerce solution for small business and startups. It's coming very soon with tons of amazing features and enhancements.

Prestashop does not require any specific requirements, Prestashop Addons are cheaper than Magento addons. You could run your website on a hosting with only from 5 euro / month.

PrestaShop 1.7 Beta 2 has been released a few days ago, that means we will see the Final very soon. Now we will see take a look into this version to discover the next Generation of Prestashop.

Discover How to install Prestashop 1.7!

Backwards compatibility

Almost Prestashop Modules will work on both Prestashop 1.6 & 1.7, but if you want to buy a Prestashop Theme at this time, please stop!

In 1.7 they reworked the way of building themes, featuring more modern and sturdier elements. To make this possible, they had to let got the heart of the 1.6 theme system. This means that Prestashop 1.6 themes will not work with 1.7. It was a hard decision for them to make, but as they said, it's a necessary one.

Prestashop team answered question about compatibility of 1.6 themes with Prestashop 1.7:

"We’re not sure at this point if 1.6 themes will be compatible with 1.7.0. We have huge plans related to the Starter Theme and we do not want to sacrifice good software design in favor of backward compatibility. So for now we’re not holding back".

We have a good news : the module system has not changed much since 1.6, so well-written 1.6 modules should work as-is, or with little cosmetic changes to match the new front or back office design. You do not need to worry too much about your current modules. All modules developed by PrestaSOO will work with Prestashop 1.7 very soon.

What's new on Beta 2

• “Manufacturers” menu is now “Brand”.
• Maintenance text can be customized from the back office.
• The translation system now uses Symfony’s Translator component ( You do not need to know about this feature if you're a Merchant!. By the way, i hope the new translator component is better than the current on Prestashop 1.6 )
• Display all combinations to make a product pack.

New features :

Clean URLS

This is a big improvement of 1.7 features as URL is an important key of Prestashop SEO. The id numbers need to be removed from the product, category, and CMS Urls. On 1.6, if you want to improve the urls by remove the id and add the keywords, i recommend to you to use Pretty Url module.

On 1.7, Pretty Url will helps you to add the keywords into your urls as well as check and edit duplicate urls to improve Prestashop SEO.

Default template

It is easy to recognize that no one want to use a 3-columns layout. You can not find the left column on Prestashop 1.7 default theme anymore.

It should be simpler and contain only the necessary features for a proper ecommerce theme - as little CSS and JS as possible. That all sounds great, because it will allow developers to create new themes more freely and creatively.

Blog integration

This is a feature that Prestashop is not doing good. A standard installation of Prestashop needs a modular blog feature that people can use for their shop as most of shop owner will need blog page for SEO purpose.

PrestaShop 1.7 Checkout

In Prestashop checkout page, they moved away from the 5-page checkout and towards a one-page checkout (OPC). They also added a side panel that displays a cart summary, and removed any extraneous information that might distract the customer.

By using Prestashop Cart Expiration module, you could show a message of an expiration time for your baskets that will be emptied automatically after a specific time in order to avoid the problem of stock unavailable. When the customer proceeds to the checkout page the module automatically adds some extra time to the countdown.

It looks so good because from any stage of the checkout process, customers know exactly how much they’re spending and where that amount is going without clicking away from the page.

Better password security

Currently passwords are salted and hashed with the md5 algorithm, it is quickly becoming an outdated algorithm. Moving to a more secure algorithm will help keep your site safe.

Bad news : upgrade to 1.7?

Given the insane amount of effort that will be required to upgrade a running store to PrestaShop 1.7, it’s likely that nobody will ever do it. Thinking of the current chills one already feels when upgrading a minor version, and seeing how painful it has been to move from 1.4 to 1.5, or to 1.5 to 1.6 in the past, chances are no merchant will ever risk his business to radically switch to a new software. Alas, this is what 1.7 will be, a completely new system that will force you to start anew with your shop.

So, if your current ecommerce site is running on Prestashop 1.6, you do not need to upgrade to 1.7. Discover more: Prestashop 1.7 : It's not for your current website.