've seen that a lot of businesses here in North America are already using the open source Prestashop platform. Even though I discarded its use, as well as many others, in favour of OXID CE during my initial due diligence about a year ago I decided to go back and see just what it’s about. This seemed valuable given that I’ll soon be trying to convince many to switch from it. Below are the main pros/cons I found. I hope the OXID team is also aware of some of this when considering areas for future improvement.
Code Architecture
I found the code in Prestashop to be of lesser quality and less intelligent than in OXID. Code in OXID is also documented much better. For Prestashop, I see this leading to higher maintenance overhead and also foresee much time lost doing customizations. Extremely important to me, as a coder, but all transparent to the average shop owner.
Admin
I think this is where Prestashop excels the most. Their back-end is very user-friendly and also very capable. Some major advantages I saw here include the ease of adding extensions, the ease of dealing with multiple languages, a WYSIWYG for content, and more comprehensive stats. This makes life much simpler for the average shop owner, who I’m sure knows very little (more like nothing) about language files, class extensions, HTML, or SQL data-mining. I think OXID CE needs to play some catch up on this front.
Themes