Knowledgebase
How to manage the options for product preferences in PrestaShop 1.5-1.6
When you go to Preferences menu>Products sub-menu in the back office of your PrestaShop you'll see some options related to products. They are global options that apply to all products. The options displayed on this Products Preferences page are grouped in several sections. Here we'll briefly go over them. For a more detailed review check the tutorial on how to configure and manage the product preferences in PrestaShop.
The options are grouped into the following sections:
Products (General)
In this section there's an option for enabling and disabling the catalog mode. When it's enabled people will not be able to purchase products. The frontend will function only as a catalog with no prices and no way to order products. There are options for choosing the maximum number of products that can be compared and the number of days a product is considered new. On the frontend there is a specific block and a page that list new products. There's also an option with which you can set a limit on how long the short description of a product can be (for an unlimited length set it to 0).
There's an option from which you can select whether a customer should be redirected to the cart summary page or to the previous page after they put a product in the cart. This only affects non-AJAX versions of the cart, so in many cases this option will not have any effect. The option for force updating friendly URLs is not available in PrestaShop 1.5.
Pagination
These are options that affect category pages. You can select the number of products that are shown per page and you can also choose the default method to be used for ordering the products. Note that on category pages on the frontend there's a Sort by drop-down menu with which customers can change the default order using some of the other criteria for ordering products (e.g. alphabetically, based on the price, etc.).
Product Page
Here you'll find an option with which you can choose whether the available quantities should be shown on product pages. With the option under it you can set a quantity number and after the quantity of a product drops below that number an alert will be shown on the product's page on the frontend that there are few items left in stock.
There's an option with which you can choose whether jqZoom or Thickbox should be used for viewing the original image of a product. With Thickbox when a customer clicks on the image of a product on its page on the frontend a window will pop out showing the image in its original size. With jqZoom the original image is shown when the mouse pointer is hovered over the image of the product.
There's an option with which you can control whether attributes that are used for combinations that are currently out of stock should be shown on product pages. From the option Display the "add to cart" button when a product has attributes you can choose whether the Add to cart button for products that have combinations should be shown on category pages. If it's not shown, customers can order the product only from the product's page.
From the option Display discounted price you can choose whether the discount amount or the discounted price should be displayed for quantity discounts. Note that this does not affect how the base price is displayed. When a product has a quantity discount there's a table on its page on the frontend that shows the quantity for which the discount applies and the discount amount/discounted price. The option affects this table.
There's an option from which you can select the separator to be used in the URLs of product combinations. It's not available in PrestaShop 1.5. You can select a hyphen (e.g. yourdomain.com/14-product-name.html#/size-s/color-green) or a comma (e.g. yourdomain.com/14-product-name.html#/size,s/color,green).
Products Stock
This section contains an option with which you can enable/disable the ordering of out of stock products. There's an option with which you can enable/disable the basic stock management. You'll definitely need to keep this option enabled if you want to keep track of product quantities. In case you want to have a much more complex system of stock management you can enable the option for advanced stock management. This will make available on the left side under all the other menus a menu labeled Stock.
For screenshots and more details check out the tutorial on how to manage the options in Preferences>Products in PrestaShop.