Magento Extension Roundup - June 2016

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.

The extension hooks into the same code that Magento uses to provide this functionality to admin panel users, and the extension itself is very lightweight. The download link is added by overriding the frontend sales order history template. While it's possible that a highly customised site has already made changes to this template, the actual change to add the link is minor and would be easily integrated with a custom design.

It seems like almost every day there is another story about a large company getting hacked. The drive for additional security can be seen everywhere, and luckily there are services becoming available to easily provide two factor authentication for any application. Nexcess have developed an integration with two of these providers, Google Authenticator and Duo Security. Both of these services are free to a point, and can help prevent unauthorised users gaining access to your admin panel and disrupting your site.

If you choose to install this application, you will need to first create an account with one of the providers mentioned above. For the Google Authenticator integration, admin panel users will need to download the official app, and upon their first login scan the provided QR code. Once the device is verified they will then be able to provide the authentication code after they have successfully entered their password each time they log in. For an attacker to gain access they would need both your admin user's mobile device and their login details, which is significantly more difficult that simply guessing or obtaining a password that may have been leaked on some other service.

Pinterest has become a fantastic place for businesses to draw in customers. While Buyable Pins might be an option for some retailers, it is good for others just to have an idea of what percentage of their Pinterest audience is clicking through to their site and purchasing items. Pinterest provide a very simple analytics tracking pixel, which this extension provides with a minimum amount of overhead.

One thing to consider if you find yourself installing a lot of extensions like this one, or copying in script snippets to enabling tracking pixels, is managing them with a service like Google Tag Manager (GTM). GTM allows for simple management of many different tracking tags, often without even needing to provide any script content at all. So if the provider updates the requirements of their tags, you don't need to go and update your script manually. It also means you don't end up with superfluous script tags needlessly bloating your website after you move on from the different tracking services you once employed.

Integrating all of the data available on the different Magento pages with GTM can be a complex task. Fortunately we provide a comprehensive extension to allow you to easily integrate GTM tags into your site.

Managing carts with lots of products using the stock Magento features can often be quite time consuming for customers. This is especially relevant for sites like grocers, where carts will often contain a large number of different SKUs and customers may need to swap products in and out.

The Multiple Cart Delete extension gives the customer more control of their cart, allowing for several items to be deleted at once, ensuring they can freely add to their cart, before trimming their selection prior to checkout.

The implementation is quite lightweight, simply overriding the cart item templates and updating the checkout controller action to enable the multi-delete functionality. Sites where these templates are will find it easy to integrate the template changes, as they only involve adjusting the existing "Remove" column to use checkboxes.