2015

In this Magento extension round-up, we quickly review some of the free extensions that were released in November, including developer tools, Magento 2 code migration, and an expanded flat rate shipping method.

DebugErrors by Fabian Schmengler

Working on any reasonably complex Magento site, you may have run into issues where templates have been incorrectly referenced, symlink support hasn't been enabled, the files haven't been added yet or had some other issue which prevents them being found. Magento gracefully handles these errors by stubbing the missing template with an empty string, which allowing templates to silently go missing but can mean the errors don't get picked up.

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In this Magento extension round-up, we quickly review some of the free extensions that were released in October, including admin activity and inventory logging solutions, order price and quantity restrictions, and events content.

Admin Activity Logger by CommerceBees

Any store that has multiple staff working in the admin panel will likely have run into a situation where a change is made that breaks something, but tracking down what that change was and when it was made is difficult (if not impossible). This extension aims to solve this problem, by logging all activity in the admin panel in an easy-to-view grid.

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In this Magento extension round-up, we quickly review some of the extensions that were released in September.

StockSort by OOWORX

Stores that have large numbers of out-of-stock products may not want these appearing before in-stock products. This straightforward extension allows sorting out-of-stock products to the end of category pages. Stock-based sorting is enabled or disabled per-store, and can't be configured for individual categories.

The extension uses an observer to add an extra sort clause to product collections. This will happen for every frontend collection load, not just the ones for category and search result pages, so be aware of this if product collections are used for any custom functionality.

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Looking to manage remarketing code or other third-party services on your site, without needing a developer to make every change? Tag Manager is a free service from Google which aims to address this common problem and give you the ability to easily add tags for Google Analytics, AdWords, tracking pixels and more. The Fontis Google Tag Manager extension for Magento will automatically export common Magento data so that it can be used in GTM.

Welcome to the sixth Magento extension round-up, where we quickly review some of the more notable extensions which were released in the past month.

Multistore Newsletter Subscription by NetGo

In a multi-store Magento installation, customers may want to sign up to the newsletter using the same email address across multiple stores. Magento's built-in newsletter subscription feature doesn't fully handle this situation - customers can only by subscribed in one store at any given time. This extension allows customers to subscribe in each store individually.

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Today we are releasing version 2.0 of the Fontis Composer Autoloader extension for Magento, which is designed to let you use any Composer dependency within Magento. This release includes changes so that you no longer need to fire an extra event to use it for code that doesn't run during a normal Magento web request, such as a shell script.

These changes make the extension more generally applicable and mean developers no longer need to worry about whether Composer dependencies will be loaded differently based on environment. The way in which we've implemented this extension also means there is no need to patch or modify core files.

PHP and Magento development has matured in the past few years. One of the biggest advances has been the widespread adoption of Composer, which has established itself as a de facto standard for the management of PHP packages and libraries. Though Composer doesn't immediately lend itself to the management of Magento extensions, the Magento developer community quickly realised the value of doing so and worked together to release the impressive magento-composer-installer. This adds support for managing Magento extensions with Composer, which can make the process of managing versions and dependencies in a Magento installation much easier.

DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service provided by Amazon, offering features like easy scalability, high availability and data durability. These properties make it well suited to being used as a Magento session storage engine. The AWS PHP SDK already includes a PHP session handler, so in theory it should be a simple matter of including the SDK and configuring Magento to use it. In practice, it wasn't quite this straightforward.

Welcome to the fifth instalment of our monthly free Magento extension round-up, where we quickly review some of the more notable free extensions which were released on Magento Connect and GitHub in the past month.

One Step Checkout by AddWeb Solution

Magento's standard onepage checkout groups fields into a series of steps which the customer needs to complete before proceeding on to the next step, and being shown the next group of fields. This means that potential customers can't see what information they'll need to fill out ahead of time, and aren't aware exactly how far through the checkout process they really are.

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Magento will automatically resize product images based on dimensions specified in templates so that customers aren't downloading large source images when all they need is a small thumbnail. However, we've discovered an issue with recent versions of Magento which will sometimes cause a "Memory Limit has been reached" error when attempting to resize images through a PHP command line script.

This issue was introduced in Magento CE 1.8.0.0 and EE 1.13.0.0 versions, and will normally only occur with code that is run from the CLI. The default PHP CLI memory limit is often set to -1 so that there is no memory limit applied. Reviewing the relevant code we found that Magento was using the following method to determine if it had enough memory to resize images: