Magento Extension Reviews

Addresses can be the bane of an online store. Even with well labelled fields, customers will often enter their details incorrectly, putting their city into the region field, adding extra numbers to their postcode, or simply entering their entire address into the first street field. Address validation can be a hard problem to solve in general, which is why Google Maps and the associated address lookup API can provided much needed assistance. This extension will provide customers with a single address input, allowing customers to search as they would on google maps and select their address from the list of available options.

In Magento 1, customer passwords can be easily set from the admin panel under the customer management interface. This capability has been removed from Magento 2 and administrators can only initiate a password reset from the admin panel. Magento will then send an email to the customer with a link for them to input a new password. Another option for setting specific customer passwords is to export the "Customers Main File", then locate and edit the exported CSV to set the password, and finally reimport back this customer CSV file.

One feature that a lot of custom checkout extensions for Magento 1 and 2 bring is the ability to let customers add comments to their order with a free-form text field. This can be used to provide important details to the merchant, such as delivery instructions. This extension adds a comments field to the default Magento 2 checkout without the need for a full checkout overhaul.

The Magento Newsletter Coupon extension allows auto-generated coupon codes to be sent to new newsletter subscribers based on a particular shopping cart price rule. Shopping cart price rules are created and configured the standard way in the admin panel under Promotions → Shopping Cart Price Rules. A shopping cart price rule can then be chosen from a list of all rules to be used for newsletter coupons. The coupon codes generated will have the same conditions, usage limit, usage per customer, and expiration date as the chosen shopping cart price rule.

The Convert Guest To Registered Customer extension allows guest customers to create a customer account on the checkout success page. This encourages customers to register for an account while still keeping the checkout process minimal and lean.

An extension for developer use, Mzeis' Server Timing extension sends profiler information to the browser with the W3C draft Server-Timing HTTP header. The Chrome browser had recent support for Server-Timing headers, and the output of this extension can be viewed in the Developer Tools under the Network tab. Reload the page, select the main resource and the profiling information will be displayed under the Timing tab.

The Restrict Payments & Shippings extension by BrainActs allows payment and shipping methods to be hidden on the frontend, but still remain fully functional on the backend. This is as simple as selecting the payment/shipping methods to hide under the admin panel restriction settings, and does not require any layout or template changes. In this way, payment/shipping methods can be disabled temporarily, without the need to reconfigure these methods every time they are required for use again.

An interesting extension for developers that adds the ability to inject functionality before, around and after any existing module/extension methods. This is an entirely new system that is separate from the event and rewrite system and can be considered when a Magento event is not available. This process will not create any conflicts that will usually happen when more then one extension/module is trying to provide existing functionality to the same location using a rewrite.

The Ean Generator automatically generates EAN-13 compatible codes based on the product's ID. These codes are stored in a product attribute, which allows for easy retrieval and manipulation using the normal product attribute approach. The codes are automatically generated either when the product is saved or periodically through the Magento cron system.