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Whether you are a computer expert or novice, the PrestaShop™ e-Commerce solution lets you take any business online.
Because PrestaShop is accessed via any standard Web browser, you can manage it from any computer in the world that has Internet access. Update your homepage, add new products, check on order status -- all you need is your PrestaShop username and password.
This Getting Started guide will show you how to:
Before downloading or installing anything, you need to provide a home for your PrestaShop online store. This means it needs to reside on a Web server. You might have a Web server of your own, but it is more likely that you have or will have your shop hosted by an Internet hosting service.
PrestaShop can host your online business on its in-house Web servers; please consult our corporate Website for details on our low-priced, secure Website hosting service. This is highly recommended for businesses with little or no experience with the Internet or computers. Naturally, we install PrestaShop for you.
Whichever hosting service you use must have the following components installed on your server space:
PrestaShop can work with PHP 5.1 or later, but that versions inferior to 5.2 have bugs that might prevent some functionalities to work well (such as invalid date timezone).
Also, PrestaShop can also work IIS Web server 6.0 or later, and nginx 1.0 or later.
Oftentimes, dedicated or shared servers have both PHP4 and PHP5 available, but only PHP4 is available by default.
To install PrestaShop, PHP 5 must be activated. If you attempt to run PrestaShop using PHP 4 or older, you will receive numerous errors, including this very common message:
Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_STATIC, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or '}' in php file on line X.
Please don’t hesitate to post a bug report concerning the tips needed to make PrestaShop run on your hosting service. We will continually to add them to this post. |
The following is a list of procedures of which we are aware:
Create an .htaccess file and add this line:
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php |
Otherwise, you can try renaming the PHP files to be executed in PHP 5 by changing the extention to “.php”.
For URL re-writing, add these lines:
Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / |
Create an .htaccess
file and simply add this line:
php 1 |
Create a .htaccess
file and add this line:
SetEnv PHP_VER 5 |
To deactivate global registers:
SetEnv REGISTER_GLOBALS 0 |
To View Your PHP Version:
In the Server section, your PHP Version displays.
To Change Your PHP Version:
Changes can take up to 24 hours to complete.
Your language change is submitted. Please allow up to 24 hours for the change to be processed by the hosting server.
Now that you have made sure that the necessary components are installed on your hosting server, there are a few things to check before installing the PrestaShop e-Commerce software.
/config
, /upload
, /download
, /tools/smarty/compile
. Then, make sure the following folders have "write" permissions: /img
, /mails
, /modules
, /themes/prestashop/lang
, /translations
/install
folder and rename the /admin
folder (for example, to /admin123
or, even better, /xyz789
). This is for security reasons. If later you forget the name you gave the /admin
folder, you can confirm its name via your FTP browser.Congratulations! Installation is now complete.
Log in to the PrestaShop back-office and start filling out your product catalog and configuring the many settings to suit your tastes and needs.
Note: Regularly back up your database, ideally on different computers, in case of problems related to hardware or security.
After you have completed setting up your shop to get it just the way you want it, but before officially opening it to the buying public, we strongly recommend that you install a local test version on your personal computer (using WAMP for Windows, MAMP for Mac, or LAMP) for Linux), or elsewhere on your hosting server.
This second version will be useful as a pre-production environment in which you can carry out all future changes to your PrestaShop online store without affecting the live version. This way, if an error should occur, your live store remains unchanged.
Note: This method is for modifying PrestaShop application files only. Do not use a test version of the SQL database.
After you have confirmed that your test version works as it should, copy the test version over the live version. (It is best to do this after peak usage hours, and with your store properly and temporarily disabled from within the PrestaShop back-office.)
PrestaShop is very easy to uninstall:
/prestaShop
(or the name you gave it after the installation, if you renamed it) from the current directory of your Web server (generally 'www').You will lose all information related to your customers, orders, invoices, and products. |