Question

I am currently developing a website for an art gallery which sells artworks online. I need to develop some code to gather and display information about artists (bio, mail, email, dates of exhibition,…). I first tried to use the manufacturers function and to only adapt the translations, replacing “manufacturer” by “artist” but I soon realized that I was limited. I do not need to associate an artist with its address and I need additional information. The problem is I do not know what would be the best way to implement this, while keeping my code clean and make prestashop upgrades easy to do.

I think I will need to make new database tables, as follows (exhibition dates, not implemented yet):

CREATE TABLE `artist` (
  `id_artist` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `name` varchar(64) NOT NULL,
  `date_add` datetime NOT NULL,
  `date_upd` datetime NOT NULL,
  `active` tinyint(4) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `email` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `phone` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id_artist`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;


CREATE TABLE `artist_lang` (
  `id_artist` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `id_lang` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `description` text NOT NULL,
  `short_description` text NOT NULL,
  `meta_title` varchar(128) NOT NULL,
  `meta_keywords` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `meta_description` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id_artist`,`id_lang`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

Should I make this a module, or directly add an artist module and controllers in the core classes? If I do so, I will have to override the product class. Since I do not need the manufacturers, should I override the manufacturer class?

Answer 1

I asked the same question on the Prestashop forum and got good advice that I will summarize here if someone had the same problem.

There is no way around modifying core classes but override should be used as much as possible.

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Back-office functions

• Create the database table, as mentioned in the question.
• Create an Artist class in overrides/classes by copy-pasting the ManufacturerCore class and and substituting mentions of manufacturer by artist as well as specifying the additional fields as instance variables.
• Create an ArtistController class in overrides/controllers and substitute mentions of manufacturer by artist
• Override the Product class and add id_artist and artist_name as instance variables. Modify the following functions so that a product is linked with its artist: __construct, getFields and getProducts
• Create a ArtistsAdmin subclass of AdminTab in admin/tabs so that the back-office can be used to add new/edit artists
• Enable the tab in the back-office (employees -> tab -> add new)
• Modify admin/ajax.php so that the artists can be queries form the back-office
• Modify ProductsAdmin in admin/tabs so that the user can choose an artist when adding/editing a product
• Create a logo for the artists tab and copy it in img/admin/artist.gif and img/admin/artists.gif

• Handle the image folder in config/defines.inc.php:

  define(‘_ARTI_DIR_’, _PS_IMG_.’ar/’);
  define(‘_PS_ARTI_IMG_DIR_’, _PS_IMG_DIR_.’ar/’);

• Crate the ar folder in img and set write permissions for everyone

Front-Office functions (not tested yet, might lack some info):

• Override Link with a function called getDistributorLink that models the getSupplierLink
• Override Tools to update the generateHtaccess function to include redirects for the artist that models the supplier redirects. I used 3 underscores (___), where the manufacturer uses 1 underscore (_) and supplier uses 2 underscores (__).
• Theme files (templates, css) to support the new core files.
• If you want to display the artist on the product page, you could also create a module that hooks extraRight, or one or more of the product page hooks.