stevenfleet

Prestashop 1.6 upgrade to 1.7 . . . finally

June 18, 2018 by Steven Fleet Leave a Comment

Oh my word, what a character building experience 😉 After many attempts, forum searches, blind optimistic trial and error my site has been upgraded from version 1.6 to 1.7.

Why didn’t you pay for the upgrade module I hear you say. I think the internet speak is “bootstrapping” which really means the website doesn’t make much of a profit to justify around £80 on the module.

The other question I see a lot on the forums is why do you want to go to version 1.7. The folks over at prestashop came up with a wonderful carrot to tempt us to move. They had developed a GDPR module (ah bloody GDPR, post for another day). The downside to this treat is the module was free on 1.7 or if you wanted to stay in the dark ages of 1.6 you had to pay. Funnily enough it was around £80. . . Nightmare £80 to stay put or £80 to upgrade there had to be a better way for cash challenged prestashop owners like myself.

The journey then begun. I tried the official (free) 1-step upgrade that said it might, could do the big jump from 1.6 to 1.7. Many failures later, from trying the module as is and then downloading the 1.7 package and forcing it to do the jump I conceded.

After much Googling and then some more a couple of posts came to light that eventually did the trick.

Copy_Shopdata this is the post that set me on the correct path. It mentions using prestools which was another revelation.

Summary of steps taken
1. Installed version 1.72 as separate copy
2. Installed prestools
3. Installed copy_shopdata
4. Copied across the cookie and secret from old store to app/config/parameters.php
define(‘_COOKIE_KEY_’,”); goes to – > ‘cookie_key’
define(‘_COOKIE_IV_’, ”); goes to -> ‘cookie_key_iv’
define(‘_RIJNDAEL_KEY_’, ”); goes to -> ‘secret’
5. Ran it a number of times as errors would occur
Common gotchas include:
– Languages if they don’t match the World ends. I simply deleted all apart from the one I required
– Mysql parameters to allow files to be written
– Tables with duplicate data as 1.7 seems to be more strict than 1.6. My example included somehow having duplicate customer groups entries. I removed duplicates and away to go

Finally when the script ran without errors there was an issue where the catalog would be empty but the products were in the database and visible by looking at previous orders and clicking on the individual product. After changing the status flag the catalog displayed all the products.

The store was upgraded from version 1.7.2 to version 1.7.3.3 using the one click upgrade module for version 1.7 without any issues. The required modules were then enabled and did some testing to check that everything was working:

Add new user
Add new product, category etc
Add items to cart
Do transaction up to payment (or if test mode enabled carry out payment)
View various front and back end pages

When everything seemed ok with the site, upload it back to live server and enable.

Next step amend the theme . . . . . . save that one for another post

Filed Under: Blog, Prestashop

Hello world!

August 14, 2017 by Steven Fleet Leave a Comment

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

WordPress

December 23, 2014 by Steven Fleet Leave a Comment

WordPress is by far my favourite website framework for most websites that I build. It is super quick to get up and running and is really powerful for the sites that I create.

When the WordPress website is setup it can then be made even more powerful by making use of the amazing plugins that are available to make running a WordPress website super easy.

Filed Under: Portfolio

E-commerce

December 23, 2014 by Steven Fleet Leave a Comment

Bath Bomb Fizz

bathbombfizz.co.uk was built using prestashop. Prestashop is a very user-friendly open-source e-commerce platform. It’s quick to set up and the code is very easy to edit. For the client a custom template was designed.

screenshot of bathbombfizz.co.uk prestashop site

Filed Under: Portfolio

Domain renewal group sales pitch

July 27, 2012 by Steven Fleet Leave a Comment

Just received a letter from domain renewal group telling me my domain will expire soon. They kindly offer me “their” best savings when I switch to their service. Their best offer is double my normal yearly rate. Thank you for scouring the domain lookup and trying to get some cash out of me but I think I’ll pass this time.

The form on the letter is a good effort. All the prices are in pounds but the total is in dollars (good mail merge).  But by far the best of this letter is the masses and masses of small print on the back. I think I’ll stick to my current provider.

Filed Under: Blog, wtf

Be careful what you ask for

November 2, 2010 by Steven Fleet Leave a Comment




homebase_extraction_fan

Originally uploaded by surfgimp

Homebase seems to have an interesting fall back when you submit a query that it doesn’t know. It gives you random stuff in the hope that you’ll buy it. I suppose there’s more chance of buying something than having a “sorry we can’t find that” page with no products.

This still amuses me. Time to try other random searches me thinks.

Filed Under: Blog

WordPress theme versus blank theme

January 16, 2010 by Steven Fleet Leave a Comment

When learning a new skill the process can be accelerated by seeing how other people have accomplished the task. When it comes to themes for wordpress there are lots available ranging from free to paid for. These can come in various setup’s i.e. one column, two column etc. Therefore when designing a new theme for wordpress it’s easy to copy an existing theme and then start editing the css / code to see how the theme changes and to tailor it to the project in hand.

Trees and sky

Sometimes though it is difficult to see the wood for the trees as even the default style.css document is over 350 lines long. This is where a barebones or completely stripped down theme comes in useful. I’m currently using starkers form elliotjaystocks.com. Then the theme can be built up using parts from the theme that you’ve been learning from safe in the knowledge that if it starts to work unexpectedly that it’s because of the code inserted not because of combination of css further down.

Debugging CSS using web development toolbar

If the css is getting a bit of a unwieldy monster it can be helpful to separate the css out into separate sheets so that individual stylesheets can be turned off to see effects on the theme. The individual stylesheets can be turned off using the web development toolbar for firefox. Sometimes it’s easier to live edit the css in the browser which is carried out by clicking on the css menu then “edit css”. If the theme is not behaving as expected then the toolbar can help visualise the problem with the stylesheet by using the “Display element information” in the information dropdown. This then shows the details for the part of the page that is selected. This includes the nesting of the css elements the size, postion, font.

Use both

To learn how to make themes it  is good to use both established themes and barebones themes. This way it can help to cherry pick the aspects out of the themes but implement them into

Filed Under: Blog, wordpress Tagged With: css

Sexy Forms

January 16, 2010 by Steven Fleet Leave a Comment

We’ve all seen forms of varying types littering the internet. My approach always used to be to get the table tags out and enclose my form in a table of varying complexity depending on how I wanted to make the form look. Then came the eureka moment that the resulting form is buried in a lot table, tr, td, th, tags. That’s when the search continued for a new method.

Fieldset tags

A simpler form can be created using fieldset tags. Within the fieldset tags we can make use of the legend tag to put a title on the form. This is more useful when there is a few sections to a form to group individual fields onto sections. Then to group the headings for the field the <label for> tag is used. This then helps when styling the form as the label can be aligned to the left and a two column form can be easily created.

This legend makes a neat heading

This code gives the form below without css.

This legend makes a neat heading

CSS layout

The form contains no markup to make the form sexy but as we’ve given the elements id names we can use CSS to alter the formatting of the form as we wish. This includes setting the form up with columns, altering the fonts, colours and anything else we wish to add.

jquery validation

To add extra extra help to the form validation can be used to give help, issue alerts to ensure that forms are filled in properly. The following jquery validation plugin was used available from http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-validation/. If running on a live website to ensure that the data is validated some server based validation should be used by using php or another server-side language.

The validation plugin has many options to customise the validation and the resulting errors / warnings. The full documentation is available at http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Validation.

Bannish boring forms forever

Next time you create a form don’t forget they don’t have to be boring

Filed Under: Blog, css

Essential add-ons for firefox

January 9, 2010 by Steven Fleet Leave a Comment

firefox logoThe true power of firefox is in the add-ons available. For the web-developer there are a number of add-ons which are not only essential but also means that most of the time you only need firefox to carry out your work.

The list of these include:

Web Developer

firebug – Great tool for debugging javascript and examining what’s going on in the background.
firequery – An addon for firebug which shows the detail of what’s going on with jquery on a page.
page-speed from google – Another addon to further expand firebug. This time it’s from google and it shows how long each part of a page is taking to load and has helpful hints on how to speed the page load process up.
developer toolbar – This addon contains a wealth of useful tools when developing. Too many to mention here, it basically helps with css, javascript, standards validation. You name it, it’s got it.

Web Design

measureit – A neat little addon which lets you drag the mouse over the page to get element sizes. This is useful when designing pages.
colorzilla – Another essential design tool. Just click on the eye-dropper and anywhere on the page it will tell you the colour.

SEO

seo for firefox – These two are from Aaron Wall of seobook.com fame. It displays seo information for the page that is being displayed. There’s also tools to delve deeper into the seo performance of the page.; rankchecker
– Thisaddonn allowssearchtermss / websites to be entered then theaddonn goes away and find where the site is ranking for that search-term.
google toolbar – Helpful toolbar if you use a lot of Google’s services. Obviously it was mainly used for displaying the all important page-rank but as page-rank isn’t all of how Google ranks a site it isn’t as important as it used to be.

This is my current favourite addons for firefox. I’m going to be on the lookout for more soon mainly to help with general blogging like image finding, screenshot etc. There are plenty being developed all the time so let me know which addons you recommend.

Filed Under: Blog

WordPress theme tutorials

January 9, 2010 by Steven Fleet Leave a Comment

One of my New Years resolutions is to create a custom design for this blog. One slight problem is that I’m more of a developer than a designer. Give me an image and I can slice / dice, write the css and develop the theme quite easily. Here’s the killer, blank space frightens me.

To start my steep template designer learning curve I went on the hunt for tutorials. Luckily a lot of the feeds I read have a lot of tutorials to stat me off. Here’s some links to photoshop wordpress theme tutorials.

Sixrevisions

Here’s a few photoshop design tutorials from six revisions. This first one is a clean blog design with a large header and main content area with sidebar for sponsors.

Clean blog design from Six Revisions

This design is made appealing by the use of the coordinated large black header and footer. It delivers a minimalist theme which could be used on a variety of blogs.

Business Layout from Six Revisions

This is my personal favourite of the three and I’m sure it will come in useful for the redesign. It uses the 960 grid system to design a minimalist blog layout.

Ultimate design roundup from hongkiat – A comprehensive list of tutorials for wed design. Even though they’re not specific for wordpress they provide good inspiration to generate templates in photoshop.

Photoshop to wordpress from scratch – A tutorial detailing the full process of creating a blog design in photoshop then implementing it in wordpress.

List of wordpress framework tutorials from Smashing magazine.

Filed Under: Blog

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