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We have just released an important update to the Fontis Westpac extension, which should be installed by all merchants using the PayWay service. The update includes a new Verisign certificate for the PayWay gateway which will be required in order to continue connecting to the gateway. Merchants who will be affected by this update should have already been contacted by Westpac.

In addition, we have added another small but often requested feature, and added in a credit card type selection box to the PayWay and QuickGateway settings pages in the Magento configuration. Merchants will now be able to easily configure whether they want to accept American Express, Discover and others.

Since version 1.11, Magento Enterprise Edition releases have included a RMA feature to help manage this process. The system supports tracking requests from when they are first created by a customer, all the way through to resolution. This post will look at how to set up and administer RMA requests from the admin panel, and will also detail a few shortcomings that will hopefully be improved in future releases.

A successful Magento implementation requires not only development expertise and an understanding of its internals and various settings, but also systems administration knowledge to ensure that the hosting environment is configured correctly and for optimal performance. As a store owner or developer who may not be familiar with all of these areas themselves, it can therefore be difficult to check on the overall quality of a particular installation. How can the relative “health” of a Magento store be quickly and easily assessed? Introducing MageAudit, the Magento Health Check.

With its most recent update (version 1.2.10.1), our Magento-MYOB synchronisation application M2M Sync now supports Magento Go. This hosted Magento solution allows businesses to set up online stores without needing to manage their own server and implementation, and offers an enhanced set of features compared to Magento Community Edition. M2M Sync has been updated to handle these additional features, such as gift card accounts and store credit, and is an ideal solution for MYOB users who are tired of error-prone manual data entry.

When editing a CMS page in Magento Enterprise Edition's admin panel, it's easy enough to make a mistake and accidentally remove a section of text or accidentally modify markup which may be a crucial part of the page's layout. While you may have back-ups to handle a situation like this, it can still be a time consuming process to retrieve and then restore the original content. However, using Magento's built-in version control system, you can conveniently restore your page to how it was at any time in the past, and also switch between different versions of a page with ease. In this post, we'll explain how this feature works and why you should use it.

From the start Magento has included the ability to modify product attributes through an interface in the administration panel. With Enterprise Edition 1.9, you can now manage customer attributes through a similar interface. This article will show you how to use this interface, as well as show you what this interface can and can't do.

The most useful feature that this interface provides is the ability to create brand new customer attributes and then define where in the site these attributes should be shown. To create a new attribute, go to Customers → Attributes → Manage Customer Attributes. The Customers → Attributes → Manage Customer Address Attributes screen works in the same way, but on customer addresses rather than customers. From this screen you can either select one of the existing attributes to edit or you can click on the Add New Attribute button to create a new attribute. You will see the following screen:

I recently had a need to resend Magento order confirmation emails for orders placed within a particular time period. Magento provides an interface for resending these emails out of the box (navigate to Sales → Orders → Order and click 'Send Email' up in the top right), but this takes 15-20 seconds per order at best. If you have more than a few of these order emails to resend, this approach will quickly become tedious. Luckily, there's an alternative: it is possible to write a Magento script to do the job for you, which I'll explore in this blog post.

Our congratulations to everyone at Big Brown Box, who were the winners of the inaugural Best Site Design award last week at the Online Retailer Industry Awards 2010. The awards were extremely competitive and drawn from over 170 nominated online businesses around Australia; the Best Site Design category in particular boasted some of the most innovative online retailers in the Australian market.

The Big Brown Box website and the key reasons for its win were described by the ORIA judging panel:

Banners are a relatively new CMS feature of Magento Enterprise Edition that allow administrators to create, organise and display promotional content. In the past, this requirement was often addressed by manually creating static blocks and customising a site's layout. By using banners and the banner rotator widget, you can now create content and then control exactly how and where it is shown on your site in a much easier way.

The default Magento onepage checkout includes six steps for the customer to complete. However, sometimes you may have a requirement to create an extra checkout step. An example of this might be an option for your customer to choose a free gift as part of their order, or an extra step to collect special delivery instructions. Using delivery instructions as an example, we'll demonstrate how this can be achieved.

The first file we need to modify is app/code/core/Mage/Checkout/Block/Onepage.php. Obviously we don't want to modify the code in the core context, so copy the file to app/code/local/Mage/Checkout/Block/Onepage.php. Magento will use this file automatically.