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Administering the Back-Office

The "Administration" menu contains a special set of preference pages: rather than giving options that impact the customer or your front-end, they are all about the inner workings of your shop, and even your business itself. In effect, these pages enable you to set how the PrestaShop software will work for you, and how you and your team will be able to use it.

Preferences

The "Preferences" administration page contains general options and settings on the way PrestaShop itself works. It has four sections.

General

This section is for the more general settings:

Upload quota

This page helps you define the authorized size of uploaded files from your own team – not from your customers.

There are three options, one being general and the two others being more specific:

Help

To help you with your everyday usage of PrestaShop, the development team has added many tips & tricks within the interface.

You can have them displayed using one of these two options:

Notifications

Notifications are numbered bubbles that are displayed at the very top of any administration page when you have loaded it, right next to the shop's name. They display the number of new items since the last you clicked on them.

You can choose not to receive them for some content types:

Quick Access

PrestaShop has handy shortcuts to your most important pages, which can be accessed through the "Quick Access" menu, at the top right of every page of the PrestaShop back-office (right next to the username).

The "Quick Access" administration page enables you to create customized shortcuts, and make your navigation within the administration area even more relevant to you and your team.

The page displays all the shortcuts that have already been created. By default, they are

Pages that open in a new tab/window will have a green mark in the "New window" column.

You can create as many shortcuts as needed – just do not overdo it, obviously, since this would render the "Quick access" menu slower to read.

Adding a new link

Let's create a shortcut the order creation page, from which you can create a new order, and even add new customers and their addresses on the fly.

As usual, clicking the "Add New" button takes you to the creation form:

Note that you absolutely can create links to other websites, for instance your PayPal account or your webmail. Simply paste the complete URL in the "URL" field, including the http:// prefix.

Employees

The "Employees" administration page lists all the user accounts that have access to your shop's back-office. By default you will find the account that was created during the store's installation, which is automatically set as SuperAdmin. The SuperAdmin has access to all of PrestaShop's features without restriction.

You should make sure to create a new employee account for every actual employee that has anything to do you with your online business. This means that you should never have a general use account that everyone can use, because you need to keep track of who did what on your shop. Indeed, employees can edit orders, accept payments and refund customers, and you need to know who did what. Having a personal administration account for each employee is a good way for you to ensure that your team manages your shop responsibly.

Adding a new employee

The "Add New" button takes you to the employee creation form.

It has a dozen settings:

Employees option

The section at the bottom of the "Employees" page, right below the employees list, has two options available:

Profiles

PrestaShop enables you to assign specific duties and rights to each employee who helps you manage the online shop. For example, the administrator will have access to the entire store, without restriction, while an employee can only have access to the catalog or orders.

By default, PrestaShop has 5 profiles ready to use:

You can see the details of the access rights by reviewing each profile in the "Permissions" page (see below).

The SuperAdmin profile cannot be deleted, only renamed.

Adding a new profile

You can add as many profiles as needed.

Adding a new profile is pretty straightforward: simply click the "Add new" button, enter a unique name for the new profile, and save.

The more complex part comes when setting the new profiles access rights. This is done in the "Permissions" page (see below).

Permissions

Permissions are the central part of PrestaShop's profiles. They enable you to see very precisely what an employee account can and cannot do on your shop.

The "Permissions" administration page is built using tabs:

When you click any profile (except SuperAdmin), the two tables appear to give you access to their criteria:

For each of the menu criteria, you have 5 options:

Meanwhile, the module criteria have only 2 options:

The SuperAdmin permissions cannot be changed: the profile simply has all the rights for every criterion.

Setting permissions for a new profile

For this example we will create a new profile, "Order Preparer". First create the profile in the "Profiles" page, by filling the "Name" field. As soon as it is saved, it appears in the list of profiles.

Then you need to assign permissions to this new profile. Go to the "Permissions" page, and click on the tab for the new profile: the list of criteria appears. By default, a new profile has access to none of the back-office pages, and can only view the impact of some modules on the back-office (for the pages he or she has permissions to view).

You have two ways to fill the criteria, depending on the limits or freedom you want the profile to have:

You have two ways to have checkboxes checked in batches:

You can then uncheck selected rows rather than spending time checking each needed rows one by one.

To avoid mistakes during the configuration of your permissions, PrestaShop automatically saves your settings every time you make a change. This means you do not have to click any "Save" button. Once you have assigned the profile its rights, you can return to the "Employees" administration page and start assigning that new profile to the employees who need it.

Menus

PrestaShop's back-office menu organization is not set in stone: while the default arrangement is built in order to have the most useful pages readily available, you might have a different opinion, and may want to change the organization, in part or in full.

This administration page enables you to move, edit, disable and even create pages.

Moving menus

Menus can be moved directly from the list. You can either click on the arrows in the "Position" column, or drag the row itself and drop it in the position you want it to have. As soon as you drop the row, PrestaShop saves the location automatically. You can drag the row when the mouse cursor is over the "Position" column.

You can disable a menu simply by clicking on the green checkmark in the "Enabled" column. Note that this will disable the menu for all back-office users. If you want to hide a menu from a specific set of users, edit their profile's permissions, in the "Permissions" administration page.

Moving pages

To access a menu's pages, click the "+" icon on the right of the row. A new list appears within the main list, with the same columns.

Pages can be moved within a menu directly from the list. You can either click on the arrows in the "Position" column, or drag the row itself and drop it in the position you want it to have. As soon as you drop the row, PrestaShop saves the location automatically. You can drag the row when the mouse cursor is over the "Position" column.

You can also move a page to a different menu altogether. This cannot be done directly from the list; you must open the page's editing form, where you will find the "Parent" option. Change that option to another menu name, save your changes, and when returning to the "Menus" page, the page will have moved menu.

You can disable a page simply by clicking on the green checkmark in the "Enabled" column. Note that this will disable the page for all back-office users. If you want to hide a page from a specific set of users, edit their profile's permissions, in the "Permissions" administration page.

Creating a new page or menu

Click on the "Add New" button to reach the page creation form.

This form has a handful option, some of which might prove complicated:

If you want to create a new menu page, choose "Home" as the parent.

Merchant Expertise

New in 1.5.4.

This page is generated by the module of the same name. It was specifically designed to help PrestaShop users keep track of their progress as e-merchants, see how much they’ve grown and progressed over the days, months and years. It is installed by default.

This module adds system of badges and points, broken down into three levels, all of which are integral to success in the e-commerce world:

The more progress your store makes, the more badges and points you earn. There is no need to submit any information or fill out any forms. We know how busy you are; everything is done automatically. Use this tool to drive your business, view your progress and reflect on your great achievements.

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