Creating or editing custom order statuses on PrestaShop

What’s a back-office setting

Statuses are managed under Orders > Statuses, where each one can have its own label, colour, and above all an automatic email trigger to the customer, with its own template. Creating a new status, attaching or removing its email, changing its colour: all of that happens from this screen, no development needed.

What isn’t natively supported, though: hiding an existing status from certain back-office users, or pulling it out of the standard workflow while keeping it for history. A status can be disabled or deleted, it can’t be conditionally hidden without development.

The 500 error on a status change

This is a common case and almost always traces back to the same cause: the email template tied to the new status is missing, malformed, or references a logo that can’t be found. A status change triggers the email being generated, and one undefined Smarty variable in that template is enough to break the whole process with a 500 error, even if the status-change logic itself is correct.

I always start by checking the email template for the status in question, inside the mails/ folder for the language used, before looking for a more complex cause.

Automating a status change

Making a status change automatically — for example as soon as a carrier tracking number is entered on the order — isn’t natively available in PrestaShop. It requires hooking code onto an appropriate hook, for instance when the order is updated, to trigger the status change under the desired condition. That’s targeted development, not a setting.