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We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.5 of the Fontis Australia extension for Magento 2. This is a minor update that fixes an issue with NT postcodes.

Changes in this version are:

• Remove integer type cast on postcodes, which causes problems for postcodes starting with 0.

The Fontis Australia extension for Magento 2 is available for immediate download on GitHub. If you have any feedback or would like to contribute, please submit an issue on GitHub.

We are pleased to announce the release of version 2.0 of the Australia Post API SDK for PHP. This library is widely used throughout the community and we hope that the new version will address a few of the issues we've had with it over the years, and make it even easier to use for other developers.

Some of the highlights from this release are:

• The Guzzle 3 client has been replaced with the more generic HTTPlug PSR-7/PSR-18 client. HTTPlug is a more modern adapter library that uses the current PSR standards for HTTP clients, and removing the Guzzle dependency should also get rid of the annoying "package guzzle/guzzle is abandoned, you should avoid using it" warning Composer shows when installing or updating packages.
• The library is now using PSR-4 autoloading, and we took the opportunity to move all of the classes into a top-level Fontis namespace.
• PHP 7.1 or greater is now a requirement. Aside from now being the lowest support version of PHP, this allows us to make use of strict types and argument and return type hints.
• The license has been changed from LGPL 2.0 to OSL 3.0, for consistency with our other packages. Both are reasonably permissive licenses so this should not have a tangible impact on anyone using the library.
• Unit tests have been removed since none of them were relevant any more, and we found the existing tests did not provide much value.

Please note that this release does not include support for the Delivery Choices API. Since Australia Post removed address validation we have not had any need for it, but we'd welcome anyone who wants to contribute changes to add Delivery Choices in.

Happy Australia Day everyone! Hope everyone down under had a great long weekend. We have a couple of announcements in celebration.

Version 1.0.4 of the Australia extension for Magento 2 has now been released. This is a maintenance release that just adds compatibility for Magento 2.3. We'd like to thank Nathaniel Rogers for his contributions to this release.

We have also started migrating our free extensions to be installable directly through packagist.org. This means that you will no longer need to order the extensions on our website to access them and you will not need to add our private repository to your composer.json file.

Welcome to the Magento extension round-up, where we quickly review some of the more notable extensions which were released in the past month. In this month's round-up, we look at extensions for redirecting product review pages, adding multiple flat shipping rates, customer group membership and payment method restriction.

Magento 2

Multiple Flat Rates by Mageplaza

License: Custom
Version Reviewed: 1.0.0

Although Magento 2 supports flat rate shipping, you are limited to a single rate. This can be restrictive when you want to expand your market to other countries or add an alternative shipping service and rate.

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We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.3 of the Fontis Australia extension for Magento 2. This is a minor update that adds the ability to export orders to CSV using the Click & Send format, and adds compatibility with recent versions of PHP and Magento.

Changes in this version are:

• Add Click & Send CSV export
• Add support for PHP 7.1 and 7.2
• Add support for Magento 2.2

The Fontis Australia extension for Magento 2 is available for immediate download on GitHub and is available to install through Composer from our site. If you have any feedback or would like to contribute, please submit an issue on GitHub.

In this month's Magento extension round-up, we look at some recent Magento 2 extensions that optimise your store's URL rewrites, notify external channels of store events, enable an enhanced FAQ page and allow customers to add comments to their orders.

Magento 2

URL Rewrite Optimiser by Fisheye

License: MIT
Version Reviewed: 1.0.2

An important part of SEO is making sure URLs are both descriptive and readable. Magento achieves this by maintaining a list of readable URLs consisting of "slugs", and the canonical URLs that they map to. For each product page, multiple URL rewrites are generated: one consisting of the product's unique slug by itself, and one for each category path that the product can be found in. This adds up to a lot of URL rewrites. In fact, for most Magento stores, the URL rewrite table is the largest in the database by a wide margin!

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In this month's Magento extension round-up, we quickly review some recent extensions: sitemap and API improvements, product visibility checks and a tool to clean up unused product images.

Magento 1

Product Visibility Grid by itonomy

License: MIT
Version Reviewed: 1.0.0

If a Magento product isn't appearing on the frontend, it can be difficult to work out why. There are a number of factors that determine whether a product is visible, including stock status, the visibility attribute, and so on. This extension displays a modified product grid that summarises the various visibility factors, so you can easily see why a product is or isn't visible. The grid also allows reindexing products, to help with cases where an out of date index is the problem.

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In this month's Magento extension round-up we look at some recent Magento 2 extensions. These extension add improvements to media storage, catalog, translations and product media gallery areas.

Magento 2

Magento2 Flysystem by Flagbit

License: MIT
Version Reviewed: 0.1.6

A powerful addition to your Magento 2 installation that allows you to use an alternative media storage location. If you already have a large amount of media on a cloud service such as Amazon S3 and end up having to manually re-upload on your installation, this extension will simply this process for you. This is achieved by configuring the required service (Only FTP at the moment), and using the new Flysystem modal included with the extension to browse and select media files.

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We are pleased to announce the released of version 1.0.3 of our Customer Group Access library for Magento 2. This version updates the library for compatibility with Magento 2.2, and PHP 7.1 and 7.2.

This update is important for the Fontis Australia extension, which depends on and automatically installs this library and would have been preventing installation on newer versions of Magento 2.

The Customer Group Access library for Magento 2 is now available for immediate download on GitHub and will be installed as a Composer dependency alongside the Fontis Australia extension for Magento 2. If you have any feedback or would like to contribute, please submit an issue on GitHub.

It is time for another Magento extension roundup, reviewing some free extensions that were released in June. This month we have a fake data generator for testing, a new style of banner slider, and product review reminders.

Magento 2

Masquerade elgentos

License: MIT
Version Reviewed: ba7a88ceec89

The Masquerade extension gives you the ability to create fake data by configuring rules. It is built upon the popular Faker library that can generate sensible looking fake data based on locales, for example addresses, names and phone numbers.

The configuration is YAML based and should be formatted using Faker formatters. Once you have specified the necessary database connection details, you can start generating fake data in the Magento database.

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