Magento Extension Roundup - May 2018

License: GPLv3
Version Reviewed: 1.0.1

The recent introduction of the GDPR has meant that website owners have a new set of rules to comply with, and the Enhanced Privacy extension is intended to help you conform with the EU regulations. The main feature of this extension is to help you allow the customers to delete, anonymise and export their personal data.

Account deletion, anonymisation, and export actions can be activated in the new "My Account → Privacy Settings" area of the customer account panel. When exporting the data, they can choose from personal, wishlist, quote and address data, and a .zip archive containing .csv files will be generated for them. If customers want to delete their accounts, there is a one hour grace period for customers to undo the deletion (the period can be configured in the admin panel). Note that customers can only anonymise their account if they have placed at least one order.

License: Custom
Version Reviewed: 1.0.0

Occasionally you may have a need to see your site from the perspective of a particular customer, such as when issues are reported or when needing to place an order through the frontend.

This extension is quite straightforward and provides the ability to act as a real customer by logging in to the customer's account. For security, only an administrator can login log in this way, and these logins are recorded with an IP address to help detect and audit suspicious behaviours.

License: Unknown
Version Reviewed: 90780596b451

Periodically a Magento site will be updated to add new features, change the design, or perform other operations which may impact the usability of the website, and this is when you may wish to put the site into a maintenance mode. This extension provides with an elegant way to switch the site among "live", "coming soon" and "maintenance" modes, which updates the store frontend with a pre-defined template and shows a countdown timer to let the customer know when the website is expected to launch or come back online.

The extension provides the option for the administrator to enter IP addresses manually to allow them to access the website while in maintenance mode.

License: BSD 3-Clause
Version Reviewed: 1.0.0

If you've done any work with Magento transactional email templates you know how painful it can be to test changes. Often it involves updating the template and repeatedly needing to send to a testing mailbox and review after each change. The Mail Viewer extension elegantly provides a preview of all of the main transactional emails directly from the admin panel with all of the context loaded, rendered the same way they would appear to a customer.

One particularly interesting feature of this extension is that it can show template and block hints directly in the preview window, which can significantly speed up the development process. However, it doesn't support comment and update email previews for now, while also only working correctly on Magento CE 1.9 / EE 1.14. An alternative is Yireo's Email Tester extension, which offers much of the same functionality.