Magento Extension Roundup - October 2015

Any store that has multiple staff working in the admin panel will likely have run into a situation where a change is made that breaks something, but tracking down what that change was and when it was made is difficult (if not impossible). This extension aims to solve this problem, by logging all activity in the admin panel in an easy-to-view grid.

For each request, the user's email address and IP address are logged, along with what they were doing, and what stores they were working on (if applicable). You can filter by any of these things, or by specifying a range of dates during which a suspect action may have occurred. A potential improvement would be making it easier for other extensions to add their own custom "Additional Information" when actions are logged, since otherwise the usefulness of the data logged is limited.

Events is a simple extension designed to make it easy to promote events your store is holding. This could be anything, from an in-store promotion to a notification of a limited sale. It lets you include some CMS content, photos or other images, as well as start and end dates. This is a small but powerful extension that is unlikely to introduce conflicts with other extensions.

One way that it could be improved is for it to tie in with Magento's Catalog Price Rules, though that may be more difficult to achieve. Also, while inspecting the code, we noticed an issue that could prevent admin users from disabling the extension through the provided system configuration setting. We hope this is addressed in a future release.

This extension makes it possible for merchants to restrict the sale of certain products by implementing a "Only 1 per customer" system. The maximum amount per order is configurable on a per-product basis, as is the message that is displayed to the customer when they attempt to purchase more than the maximum.

While there are other ways this functionality could have been implemented, it functions as described, and will definitely be suitable for merchants who wish to prevent their products from selling out too quickly.

In a similar vein to the previous extension, this one lets you restrict certain customers from placing orders if they aren't ordering enough in a single transaction. We imagine this would be most beneficial for implementing a minimum for customers who have access to bulk pricing based on their group.

This extension introduces a couple of rewrites to various classes in order to implement the desired functionality, so there is the potential for conflicts with other extensions.

Finally, we have an extension that logs all inventory changes to all products. This can be useful to track how quickly particular products sell out, or to potentially try and debug problems with inventory level adjustments being made by multiple means.

However, a limitation of this extension is that it doesn't currently capture all stock level changes. Where updates are made through product imports, the changes are not recorded, so it may not be possible to rely on the extension for an explanation of every possible inventory change.