Magento Extension Roundup - September 2016

The Switch Order Owner extension provides the ability to change ownership of an order in the admin panel. This could be useful in certain situations, such as when orders are created by company agents, and require an ownership change to the actual customer that will be receiving the goods. Another example is guest orders which were accidentally placed by a registered customer, and need to be assigned to their account after the fact.

It should be noted that this method of updating orders goes against a core part of the Magento order system, which is that once an order is created it cannot be changed (outside of minor edits to the addresses).

Sonic Free Shipping is a shipping method that allows an administrator to select specific customers which shoud receive free shipping. Customer selection is done through a multi-select field that contains a list of all store customers. This would obviously become difficult to manage for any reasonable sized store, so it would be most useful for smaller stores which cater to a specific set of customers.

The extension is very straightforward and just allows you to automatically delete backups created by Magento Backup Tools. You have the option to select the number of days you want to keep the backups for, and the extension will delete all backups older than that.

As you might expect, the extension is quite simple, and is primarily a cron job that runs at 11pm every night and cleans up any old backups. We would certainly suggest using a more advanced backup system than the one built into Magento, as it has a number of drawbacks. If you are using it, however, then this extension might help ensure that you're not using excess storage for backups which aren't needed anymore.

The ProductScore extension adds new "score" attributes to products, which will be assigned values using data supplied by a providers. Currently Google Analytics and Magento are supported as data providers, allowing scores to be set based on click through rates, price, number ordered and so on. Data is pulled from the providers and assign to products with a cron job that runs every night.

Once the data has been added to the products, it can be used as a sort option on category pages as an alternative to the normal options of position, price, and name. Since the scores are just Magento product attributes they can be used in other ways as well, such determining whether to display a special badge on the product.