Magento Extension Roundup - January 2017

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.

Rewrites do exist for both the One Page Checkout payment methods and shipping rate result classes, which means that there may be conflicts with other cart/checkout customisations, but will not be an issue if using the default Magento checkout.

Two Factor Authentication by Nortoneo integrates with Google Authenticator and email to add an additional layer of security to the Magento admin panel. Administrators will have to enter both their login password and a temporary access code in order to gain access to the admin panel. This authentication code can either be sent to an email address, or generated using Google Authenticator on a mobile device, depending on the configured settings. The last IP address used by a user to login successfully is saved in the database, and a setting can be turned on so that the same user logging in from the same IP address will not need to enter an authorisation code again.

This extension by SEO Melbourne allows for easy generation of XML sitemaps, as you might expect, and offers a number of advantages over the standard Magento sitemap generator:

• Submit to both Google and Bing search engines
• Configure which pages to include in the sitemap (i.e. Categories, products, CMS pages, etc.)
• Set time intervals (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly) for sitemap submissions

There are no rewrites so the existing Magento core sitemap functionality should be disabled in order to avoid conflicts between differing sitemaps.

This extension by Turiknox integrates Facebook Pixel tracking into Magento by inserting the relevant tracking Javascript into the page layout when a customer has:

• Viewed a page
• Registered for a new account
• Added products(s) to the cart/wishlist
• Performed a search
• Proceeded to the checkout
• Made a purchase

In most cases it would be better to use a service like Google Tag Manager to manage tracking pixels, as you don't need to install additional extensions and any future updates Facebook makes can be made without requiring changes to the website code.