Magento Extension Roundup - August 2015

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.

This extension rewrites the Mage_Newsletter_Model_Resource_Subscriber class to introduce store-scoped newsletter subscriptions. Besides this rewrite, this extension requires no major configuration or database changes.

This extension adds a team members page to a Magento site. Administrators maintain a list of team members, including photos, descriptions and social links. A list of all team members is displayed on the frontend, and site users can click through to individual pages for each team member. The extension also handles adding links to the team members page to the header and footer.

The extension adds a table to the database to store team member data, but doesn't rewrite or override any core functionality. Unfortunately the frontend URL path for the team member page isn't configurable from the admin panel. If you want to change it, you will need to edit the extension's config.xml file.

If you want to go further with tailoring content for individual customers than Magento allows out-of-the-box, this extension might help. It allows merchants to use personalisation tags based on product categories in CMS static blocks. By utilising a customer's purchase and product viewing history, the extension is able to identify which blocks to display to the user. For example, a CMS block tagged with "Home & Decor" will be shown to customers that have viewed or purchased products in the "Home & Decor" category. This feature could be used on pages such as the customer dashboard to notify the customers that items from their most viewed categories are on sale.

This extension adds two new tables and some class rewrites. It requires a nightly task to build up personalisation references for each customer, and depends on the Most Viewed products report data being current. Additionally, adding CMS blocks to the frontend is left up to the developer to implement.

Magento doesn't have built-in support for customer testimonials, but this is a feature a lot of sites want. This extension allows you to enter testimonials from customers from the admin panel and display them on any CMS page using Magento's block directives. The extension also provides support for a page listing all testimonials, though no template is provided and so this won't work without some further development.

There are no rewrites in place, but installing this extension will add a new table to the database. The extension does add a new 'Jaljale' top-level menu to the admin panel, rather than putting its links under an existing menu. It wouldn't be hard to change this by editing the extension's XML configuration files, though.