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Jae Beojkkoch
Jae Beojkkoch

Posted on • Originally published at news.jae.moe on

Prestashop: the good, the bad and the ugly

Prestashop logo

I recently got a job opportunity where I had to maintain a PrestaShop website & additional modules, how bad could it be?

Well, even worse than you may think.

At first, PrestaShop seemed like an okay CMS, not good, not bad, just meh.

The pages were loading in a reasonable time for a PHP application this big and there were no major issues.

And then a week passed.

I immediately noticed the "Modules and Services" tab took at least a minute to load in the first place, more than ten in the worst cases, this is due to PrestaShop trying to load the distant module shop, which is frankly hosted by people that don't know how to run a server.

Did I also mention that there is no way for a regular user to disable that? I had to modify PrestaShop's core to get rid of this "feature" because modules that previously blocked this loading were not working any more.

Currently, the shop runs on the 1.6 of PrestaShop which is riddled with thousands, if not millions of bugs.

PrestaShop themselves, in their incompetence, decided to not fix the bugs of the 1.6 and release the 1.7, without prior notice, changing everything and rendering thousands of modules unusable on newer versions.

As of now, updating PrestaShop adds way more bugs than it fixes, this is why updating is not even remotely recommended for anyone in their right minds!

Also, when we're at it, let's talk a bit about modules and support.

PrestaShop is managed by idiots; some modules can cost up to a fucking thousand Euros but the support is as good as talking to a bot.

In the best case, you pay more and only get three months of support and one update for a module that will maybe work.

Nothing on their shop is tested before being sold, and it wouldn't surprise me if there would be malicious content on there, sold for real money.

When having a problem with a module, the person charged with your support request will most likely say "it's your server, not our module" and close your support ticket (for both unofficial and official modules).

Given the countless bugs, incompetent people and shitty support, please, please do not use PrestaShop.

A good alternative would be WooCommerce; if you really want to use PrestaShop, please use the fork ThirtyBees whose goal is to offer a stable experience, without any bugs.

Top comments (2)

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stifler97 profile image
Ali Samie

I started php by doing some woocommerce projects, and in 2021 I joined a team to work on PrestaShop websites.
I have tried so many times to be active and positive in Github, StackOverFlow and even their own stupid forum but it was not a good experience. They only care about technical stuff like unit testing and coding standards, instead of fixing logical bugs and broken UX.
They have actually built this platform only for France as they have some specific Tax rules.
It just takes you back to the stone age of the web. I totally regret wasting my time on this platform.

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athigb profile image
athigb • Edited

I used to use Prestashop since 1.3 version and i have made almost 60 e-shops till 2019.
At version 1.6 things was changed and become too bad!
First of all the translation was awful ! I couldn't use it anymore.
Actually i didn't have any problems with bugs.
All modules was very expensive and and little by little they became fewer and fewer.
There is no way to connect it with bank accounts anymore for payments!
The mainly reason that i stopped using it was the fact that a lot of themes are connected always with the creators. That means that when a creator stops operating then the theme corrupts too!!!!!
At 1.7 release almost all of my friends stopped using it and the whole Greek Prestashop forum community gradually remained inactive!!
And i agree that PrestaShop is managed by idiots