Complete Retrospective of PrestaShop Events 2025

Today, I offer you a complete and detailed summary of all the major PrestaShop events in 2025, an exceptional year marked by important launches, major innovations, and strong community mobilization.

Live Updates: Continuous Connection with the Community

Throughout 2025, I closely followed the monthly Live Updates from PrestaShop, where the management team and project contributors shared the latest developments with the developer community. January 29, 2025 saw the first Live Update of the year, marked by the official announcement of the launch of PrestaShop 9 Beta 1 and version 8.2.1[1]. This event also marked the beginning of the Targeted Contributions initiative, an innovative program allowing community contributors to focus on specific projects addressing identified needs.

On March 5, 2025, I attended the second Live Update which focused on preparations for version 9.0, with particular emphasis on the redesign of the Discounts functionality that was under development for PrestaShop 9.1[2]. This presentation provided developers with visual previews of upcoming changes and practical advice for adapting their modules and themes. On April 23, 2025, the April Live Update offered a live demonstration of Update Assistant v7, the revolutionary module replacing the legendary Auto Upgrade[3]. This presentation was crucial for developers and merchants wanting to understand the optimized update process to PrestaShop 9.

On July 30, 2025, the July Live Update proved to be one of the most memorable of the year, with the anticipated presentation of One Page Checkout, a transformative feature for PrestaShop 9.1[4]. This session also covered the progress of Hummingbird 2, the modern theme designed to offer a smoother development experience, and formally announced the PrestaShop Developer Conference 2025 that would take place in November.

FOP Days 2025: The Major Community Event

I had the chance to participate in FOP Days 2025 which took place on March 26-27, 2025 at Le Nida in Issy-les-Moulineaux, Paris, marking the third edition of this event started in 2021[5]. This gathering adopted a new enriched format over two full days with an exclusive evening, bringing together more than 180 expected participants around 30 conferences and workshops covering the most relevant themes of the ecosystem. The program encompassed sessions on AI and automation, security and privacy (PCI DSS), SEO and digital accessibility, with leading speakers like Patrick Valibus on managing large-scale e-commerce projects[5]. The event was supported by 12 quality sponsors and culminated with the FOP Awards ceremony rewarding excellence in generative AI, security, and privacy protection. Unlike previous years, FOP Days 2025 did not offer video recording, encouraging active attendance and fostering in-depth discussions among professionals.

The Launch of PrestaShop 9.0: A Technological Revolution

June 6, 2025 marked one of the most important moments of the year with the official launch of PrestaShop 9.0, a major version awaited for over 2 years[6]. I was impressed by this new version which represented a profound overhaul of PrestaShop’s technological core, integrating the most modern web development technologies. PrestaShop 9.0 now relies on Symfony 6.4 LTS and PHP 8.4, offering a fully modernized and more robust technical foundation than ever[7]. The launch of this major version affected more than 250,000 online stores running on PrestaShop, promising substantial improvements in performance, security, and maintainability.

The main innovations of PrestaShop 9.0 include a new Admin API developed on API Platform, enabling cleaner integrations compliant with modern REST standards, a new management interface design entirely rethought to improve user experience, and native SEO improvements crucial for merchants. These SEO improvements integrate support for WebP and AVIF formats for product images, optimization of Core Web Vitals, particularly for Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and fully customizable URLs even for faceted filters[8]. PrestaShop 9’s code also offers increased performance with considerably reduced page load times, a major competitive advantage for merchants seeking to improve conversion rates.

PrestaShop Day 2025: The Essential Event for Decision-Makers

June 10, 2025 saw PrestaShop Day 2025 held at 3 Mazarium in Paris, hosting an impressive gathering of more than 300 merchants, 20 exhibitors, and featuring 14 major conferences[9]. I observed that this annual event focused on three fundamental pillars: the freedom of open source, omnichannel flexibility, and controlled profitability. The themes addressed encompassed digital sovereignty, a particularly crucial subject in a context where locked proprietary solutions dominate the market, logistics and optimized delivery strategies, artificial intelligence management in e-commerce, innovative payments with partners like PayPal, and new European regulatory challenges[10]. The program also included 100+ business meetings scheduled between exhibitors and visitors, and allowed participants to discover PrestaShop Enterprise, PrestaShop’s premium offering for ambitious stores already generating millions in revenue[11].

Maintenance and Stabilization of PrestaShop 9

October 13, 2025 marked the release of PrestaShop 9.0.1, the first maintenance version of branch 9[12]. This version brought more than 60 bug fixes and integrated more than 140 merged pull requests, with particular attention paid to resolving issues encountered during the installation process on certain environments. PrestaShop 9.0.1 significantly improved deployment reliability and overall platform stability, ensuring a smoother experience for all users. The release of this first maintenance version confirmed PrestaShop’s commitment to rapid stabilization of this new technological foundation.

PrestaShop Developer Conference 2025: A Phenomenal Event

November 19, 2025 saw the PrestaShop Developer Conference 2025, the third edition of this event that has become one of the pillars of PrestaShop’s calendar[13]. I was particularly impressed by the fact that, for the first time, the conference adopted a hybrid format with a physical presence in Paris (at Le Cyclone, in the 13th arrondissement) and worldwide online transmission. The major innovation was the implementation of automatic subtitles in 35 languages, making technically dense content accessible to a truly international audience. The event brought together 28 speakers from more than 6 different countries, including representatives from international organizations traveling from South America.

The conference was organized around more than 18 presentations distributed across two main stages: the Main Stage, dedicated to executive presentations and major keynotes, and the Tech Room, offering in-depth technical sessions and practical workshops. The major announcement of the day was the launch of the PrestaShop MCP Server, a revolutionary integration of the Model Context Protocol, an open standard allowing PrestaShop stores to connect natively to AI agents on the market like ChatGPT, Claude, and Mistral[13][14]. This announcement marked a turning point in PrestaShop’s strategic vision for AI and automation.

The MCP Server: Major AI Innovation

The PrestaShop MCP Server, launched on November 19, 2025, represents a decisive technological innovation for the e-commerce ecosystem[15]. I was fascinated by this standardized connector available for free for PrestaShop 8+, which establishes a secure bridge between PrestaShop stores and commercial AI agents. The MCP protocol allows agents to recognize business objects such as products, customers, and orders, and to automatically execute tasks in natural language, transforming simple queries like “show me my ten biggest customers this month” or “rewrite all product descriptions marked as ‘declining’” into concrete back-office actions[15]. This approach preserves merchants’ data sovereignty while opening automation possibilities previously reserved for large proprietary platforms.

The PrestaShop Acquisition: A Historic Turning Point

December 11, 2025 marked the announcement of an absolutely historic event for the PrestaShop ecosystem: CyberFolks and Sylius signed an agreement to acquire PrestaShop, one of the world’s largest open-source e-commerce platforms[16]. This strategic acquisition represents a major turning point in the European e-commerce technology landscape. The transaction, structured around the acquisition of 79% of cyber_Pixel by CyberFolks (with the remaining 21% held by family foundations of Sylius founders), will allow cyber_Pixel to acquire 100% of PrestaShop, 100% of Sylius, and 100% of BitBag[17]. The expected sale price for all PrestaShop shares amounts to 53.765 million euros.

This merger creates a European e-commerce giant combining three complementary models: the SaaS model represented by Shoper, the open-source model embodied by PrestaShop, and the headless architecture of Sylius. The scale of this new entity is impressive: PrestaShop serves 230,000 active stores worldwide that generated 22 billion euros in GMV in 2024, while Sylius supports enterprise and mid-market projects representing approximately 7 billion euros in annual GMV[18]. After the merger, the CyberFolks ecosystem will total approximately 35 billion euros in GMV, positioning the group as Europe’s most powerful e-commerce technology provider. PrestaShop’s key markets include France, Spain, Italy, the USA, and the UK, while Sylius focuses on France, the USA, Italy, Poland, and Germany, creating extensive and complementary geographical coverage[19].

This acquisition ensures the sustainability of the PrestaShop project while preserving its open-source character, a crucial point for the developer and merchant community. It also opens new innovation perspectives by combining PrestaShop’s expertise in accessible e-commerce solutions with Sylius’s enterprise capabilities and Shoper’s SaaS approach, offering a complete portfolio covering all market segments.

Cross-cutting Themes of 2025: AI, Sovereignty, and Modernization

I observed that the year 2025 was marked by three major cross-cutting themes throughout the events. First, the rise of artificial intelligence manifested through the announcement of the MCP Server, discussions on business process automation, and exploration of AI agents in the payment ecosystem. Second, digital sovereignty became a central issue, both at PrestaShop Day and FOP Days, with a clear message addressed to merchants: regain control of their data and technological infrastructure against siloed proprietary solutions. Third, technological modernization materialized through the launch of PrestaShop 9.0, the arrival of Hummingbird 2.0, improvements to the update system, and continuous evolution of the Admin API, progressively transforming PrestaShop into a truly modern platform adapted to contemporary e-commerce challenges.

In summary, 2025 was a pivotal year for PrestaShop, marked by the launch of a revolutionary major version, the announcement of a transformative AI integration, the historic acquisition by CyberFolks and Sylius, and the strengthening of the developer and merchant community through large-scale events. These achievements position PrestaShop as a modern, sovereign, and future-proof e-commerce solution, capable of competing with the biggest market players while preserving the values of openness and flexibility that characterize the open-source ecosystem.