Magento Extension Roundup - September 2015

Stores that have large numbers of out-of-stock products may not want these appearing before in-stock products. This straightforward extension allows sorting out-of-stock products to the end of category pages. Stock-based sorting is enabled or disabled per-store, and can't be configured for individual categories.

The extension uses an observer to add an extra sort clause to product collections. This will happen for every frontend collection load, not just the ones for category and search result pages, so be aware of this if product collections are used for any custom functionality.

By default, Magento doesn't allow newsletter subscriptions from the checkout. This extension adds this frequently requested feature. A 'Subscribe to Newsletter' checkbox is added to the checkout, which can be used by both guests and logged-in customers. The checkbox title and initial state (checked or unchecked) can be configured, and the extension can be enabled or disabled for each store individually.

The extension adds the checkbox by modifying the checkout agreements block and template. If these have been customised, then some additional work may be required to use this extension.

This extension shows a popup when users appear to be leaving the page, detected by the user moving their mouse cursor to the top of the browser window. The extension is able to generate unique coupon codes for customers that sign up to the newsletter.

A custom controller is used to accept sign-ups, and an observer is used to generate coupon codes. The extension's demo page shows the popup every time the mouse is moved off the top of the page, but this appears to be because a 'developer mode' setting is enabled - it wouldn't normally do this. The extension does not appear to have any support for touch devices.

The media files for a Magento site can take up a lot of space. Developing with large sets of media files requires copying them around, which is time-consuming and requires development environments with lots of storage space. This extension generates very small mock media files for use in development, allowing the same filenames and paths to be used while not requiring a copy of the actual media files.

The extension requires the Mediamock tool, available as a separate binary. This both generates a list of media files from the source Magento installation and serves them in the development environment. The Magento extension itself is responsible for making sure the development environment doesn't generate any product media files.