Prestashop, unlike Magento, is the new open source ecommerce solution that any seasoned developer can pick up and modify to their needs.  It’s still very new and there aren’t very many payment or shipping modules yet.  I’ve had the opportunity to work with Prestashop for my employer this past week and will share my experience. I chose Prestashop over Magento, oscommerce, zencart, and xcart based on the customizations we needed.

Pros:

1. Good use of object oriented PHP

2. Smarty templates for the view layer

3. Easy to customize code

4. Tableless design that uses a lot of CSS

5. “Block” content that can be edited via the admin by point and click.

Cons:

1. Poor design of attribute combinations

2. Little to no comments within the code

Download or try the online demo at http://www.prestashop.com .

If you’re like me and you tried the “lost password” link on prestashop’s backend and never received the email, you might try this solution if you have access to the database.  Look in config/settings.inc.php for the _COOKIE_KEY_ value as you’ll need that. Run the following SQL and replace the <> variables with your information.

UPDATE employee SET passwd = md5(“<_COOKIE_KEY_ value><yourNewPassword>”) WHERE email = “youremailaddress”;

hope that helps