| Include Prestashop in a CodeIgniter application |
[eluser]fromjah[/eluser]
Hi all, I would like to share with you some of the problems I've been working around for too long :> I'm on the process to integrate the prestashop admin and ecommerce capability for the ecommerce part of a website I'm building. This shop should work in parallel of the CI app I've built, as the ecommerce is only one of the many module of the website. Don't know if I'm clear enough, my english is a bit poor. In few words, load the catalog, cart and checkout from prestashop and integrate them in the CI app, using the existings header and footer. I don't really know where to start with, I'm not even sure how the architecture should work, I'm wondering if I put the prestashop folder directly in the root of my ci project or not. The sessions should be quite fun to work with as much as the header and database functions... If someone have already done such integration work could you please leave a message here about how you've done it, do some magic with a kind of API maybe? Thanks anyway to have read. Ciao !
[eluser]fromjah[/eluser]
Ok well thanks all for your enthusiasm for this thread  Just jocking, here is a development : I'm wondering if keeping the two database separated is good ? It sounds like it could be a bad start.. Should I just prefix the prestashop database and put in in the same database as the codeigniter app?? Then I'm exploring some way using CURL, could it be part of the solution ? Is that a bad idea?? I've also came across this, the restful way of doing things : http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/wo...igniter-2/ I'm not confident with that one, but it looks like what I need for this project !! Any guess ?? If you ever work on this kind of project, any help is really appreciated !!
[eluser]AlexC33[/eluser]
In fact, i'm interested... It's what I have to do for my project. But In my case, both software are totally separated. The visual part of the site is copied to prestashop. What I'll do is an api to communicate between both databases (users only register on one site, and are known to both). What I need to do now is to find a way to make CI and prestashop share their sessions. My users will log on one of them, and when they change site, it must be seamless for them... If I find a way, I'll post my solution here ------------ PS : Sorry to necrobump this (just occured to me the orignal post was almost a year ago)
[eluser]Ryan Paddy[/eluser]
I'm also considering integrating CI and Prestashop. I'm building a reasonably involved site. My preference is that users will log in once and that will start a session both on my site and the shop, seamlessly. I'd also like to be able to keep up to date with Prestashop releases, so I don't want to modify it too much - I'd prefer to do the dev work in CI and just integrate with Prestashop via its API. Considering installing Prestashop alongside CI, with separate user tables (probably in separate databases). When someone registers on my site, I create a parallel user in Prestashop, when they log in to my site, I log them into Prestashop, etc. This is my first time using both CI and Prestashop (my background is .Net & Salesforce.com, with some non-framework PHP), so it would be good to hear from experienced folks if this sounds reasonable or if I'm barking up the wrong tree. Open to other shops, but I keep reading that Magento can be slow. Am also tossing up between CI and Yii, but that doesn't seem to have any solid shop integration either.
[eluser]haseydesign[/eluser]
@ryan I've recently released a new free comprehensive and flexible shopping cart library built specifically for CodeIgniter called 'flexi cart'. It is capable of implementing many of the features that you can get from other e-commerce shops like Magento, Opencart, Prestashop etc. However, rather than acting as a pre-built all-in-one package, its acts more as a toolbox allowing you to build the specific e-commerce features you require into your store. The library comes complete with an in-depth demo and documentation to get you along your way. http://haseydesign.com/flexi-cart If you have any queries, contact me, and i'll try and help you out with it.
[eluser]Ryan Paddy[/eluser]
Cheers mate, I'll check flexi cart out. Your site looks very nice. I should have said, if there's a shop solution that builds on CI that I can incorporate in my site, then that could well be preferable to trying to integrate with a non-CI shop like PrestaShop. I just couldn't find a decent CI shop module or library. Since my last post I've found Community Cart (discussed in the comments at http://codeigniter.com/wiki/Community_Cart) which may take a similar approach to yours, but the developer doesn't seem to have productised or documented it quite as much as you have with flexi cart, and I think you have more features. Has flexi cart been used in anger yet? Also, do you intend to keep it free-to-use, at least for an unsupported version? EDIT: fixed "presta cart" typo
[eluser]haseydesign[/eluser]
The 'flexi cart' library - not presta cart  - was originally custom developed for a client to extend CI's default cart library which was a little too basic.However, I then decided to keep on developing the extension into a full standalone library with all the fancy bells and whistles. The site it was originally developed for is simplyjewellers.co.uk. They ended up only using the cart functionality for 'Special Offer' items found via their 'Our Jewellery Range' menu, so it is by no means a great example of the libraries abilities, but it can give you an idea outside of the supplied demo. As for the price, the library is absolutely free for anyone to use however they want. So go make yourself some money! If you have any queries, post them to the CI forum thread http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/212926/ so other users can benefit from the info. If you end up using it for a project, i'd be interested in seeing what the library is used for, so keep us posted. |
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