Prestashop Announces Their Updated Software Version: What’s In “Store” Now?

PrestaShop is open source e-commerce software used to power over 250,000 stores with international access. The developers of PrestaShop and others are committed to helping small businesses expand into the e-commerce trade at no cost.

The updated version of the software primarily sports a new facelift in the back office, but they have added a few tweaks that the users will find make their experience better, faster and less likely to slow down during peak traffic times. The primary reason for the decrease is the improvement to SQL queries and cache issues. According to Jocelyn Fournier, CEO and Founder at Softizy, “1.6.1.0 is a major release in terms of performances, with up to 10x speed up in some cases”.

It is well-known that the European Union not only took ten years to form and gain full steam, they came with a labyrinth of regulation and rules to be navigated through in order to do business internationally. This can be very challenging to those who wish to maintain an international retail presence.

The developers at PrestaShop have placed 15 new options into the “Advanced EU Compliance module”. These additions will make legal compliance less complicated and faster. This update has been something users have needed for a while.

In addition to the changes in the EU Compliance module, the coders have adopted the PSR-2 coding style. In April 2015, a survey of developers working with PrestaShop was polled about the change to PSR-2. Nearly 85% of the respondents thought it was a good idea to move to the PSR-2 code base. It was reported in June 2015 that the move would begin with the release of PrestaShop v1.6.6.0. The thought process on this change was to assist in keeping code integrity. All new code submitted through GitHub should follow this style guideline.

PrestaShop has also tweaked the taxes and price calculator. The rounding of prices and management of taxes has been improved over the previous versions and should make the checkout process more streamlined and efficient.

The back office controls, the search function and the installation (and update) processes have all been improved. Besides the new coding standard that’s been adopted, they are introducing a new practice in relation to the Semantic Versioning Scheme. For those reading this that aren’t familiar with what “semantic versioning” is it is the process by which updates to software are tracked. SemVer for short makes tracking changes to the program easier. The numbers will end up being more coherent as time goes on and will make it easier for developers around the world coding for the software to know if they need to check if the newer version will impact their module design or their client’s stores.