2016/07

The Product Attributes index is an important part of Magento's category filtering system. This post provides an overview of what it is and how it works.

Layered navigation and the Product Attributes index

Magento's layered navigation allows customers to filter categories by whatever attributes you've set up. Customers can filter down to red t-shirts that come in size L, or only phones with more than 16GB of storage that fit into their budget. The issue with allowing this flexibility is that the product attribute data that's being filtered on is stored in Magento's EAV (entity-attribute-value) database tables. The EAV data model allows Magento to efficiently store a wide range attribute data for different types of products, but a downside is that it's harder to query than traditional flat database tables. To solve this problem, Magento uses the Product Attributes index.

It's time for another Magento extension round-up, reviewing some free extensions that were released in June. This time we're looking at extensions allow frontend PDF printing, admin panel two factor authentication, multiple cart item delete and Pinterest tracking pixels.

Frontend PDF Invoice by Modules4U

While Magento provides adequate functionality for customers to view details about their past orders, it leaves them out in the cold if they actually want to take a copy of their orders for record keeping. This extension fills this gap in functionality, providing an easy way for customers to download a PDF of their order, with no setup required.

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We are pleased to announce the release of version 3.1.6 of the Fontis Australia extension for Magento 1. This is a minor version release of the extension which includes the following changes:

• Adds a new ATL options column to the exported Click & Send CSV file
• Fixes a bug with EXPRESS services

Thanks to Digital Pianism for their contribution.