Author: Extendware Team

Magento Image Optimization Extension

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Image Optimization is very important when trying to improve your Google page speed. This is especially true because Magento will auto-resize your catalog product images and when it does this they are not in their most optimal form. Previously, having an magento image optimized store was impossible.

That has all changed! Now Magento Image Optimization will optimize your jpeg, gif, and png files so that they are as efficient and fast to download as possible. Some stores are seeing up to a 30% reduction in total page weight and nearly every store will see some reduction. Images are optimized efficiently in the background so that your site speed is not affected. If you are running an older version of Site Optimizer, then we highly recommend upgrading. Refer to the demo at the Magento Image Optimization product page.

Magento Loyalty Extension Released

Extendware Team

Enhance sales and reward your most loyal customers with discounts. Loyalty programs allow you to incentivize customers to purchase from you instead of competitors. With our Magento Loyalty Program you will be able to incentive customers based on order history, average order amount, and account age. We provide you with 3 new sales rule for creating unique sales rules that reward a subset of your customers and we also provide a standard loyalty program based on order history. When customers feel like they have an investment in your business, they will be more likely to be repeat customers!

How is our loyalty program different?
It is extremely flexible. It provides 3 new sales rule and it also operates outside of sales rules. This means it will not conflict with any existing sales rules. It allows discounts on the marginal dollar, so customers do not have to place multiple orders to maximize discounts. View the Magento Loyalty Extension page for more information.

Magento Bulk Product Updating – Tier / Group Price Support!

Extendware Team

Managing Tier / Group prices is very time consuming task in Magento. For each product you must make several clicks of the mouse and potentially input dozens of numbers. If you need to change 100s of products, this could take you hours or even days. Magento Bulk Product Updating solves this by allowing you to copy tier / group prices from another product. The following tier / group price features are supported:

  • Copy – Copy the tier/ group price from one product to other products.
  • Delete – Delete the tier / group price from products.

Each of these features can be applied to an unlimited number of products. If you have 100 products that all have the same tier / group prices, then you can update all 100 at the same time!

Note: Tier / group price actions are fully compatible with Magento Tier / Group Price Percentages.

Magento Product Labels Extension Released

Extendware Team

Highlighting your special offers, featured products, sale items and more can improve your catalog’s conversion rate. What good is a promotion if you are not communicating the promotion effectively to your customers? Magento Product Labels allows you to highlight products by placing images / labels over the product image.

The number of marketing possibilities are endless. Mark items as being on clearance, put a graphic an “50% OFF” label on a product, or show which products are new in your catalog or which have free shipping. Magento Labels Extension includes advanced filtering rules and features. It is only limited by your imagination!

Informing customers of hot items, sales, etc is not the only use-case of Magento Labels. You can also use it to inform customers of special product characteristics. For example, highlight a product as being “100% natural”, “Organic”, “Made Locally”, “1 Year Guarantee” or anything else you can imagine. The goal is to communicate important information in an emphasized, visually pleasant way! You can even place multiple ribbons on a single product image.

Tier / Group Price Percentages Extension Released!

Extendware Team

With Extendware’s Tier / Group Price Percentages you may now specify percentages for tier / group prices. This enables you to ensure that the tier / group price will always be a percentage of the product price. For example, let’s say you have a wholesale and a retail store and your normal store price is the retail price. Specific users login in order to view the wholesale price. You may now set the whole sale price to be 90% of the normal price, so all prices will appear to be 10% off to wholesale users.

Tier prices work in the same way. If you want to give a 5% discount when someone orders 5 or more a product, then set the tier price to be 95%. When you update the price, the tier price will automatically update to be 95% of the product price

As you can imagine, this will save you a lot of time when managing product tier / group prices!

Magento Bulk Product Updating and Mass Product Actions – Pricing Flexibility

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Bulk Product Updating and Mass Product Actions 1.0.5 has been released. This is the 5th release of our best in class mass actions Extension. In this release several important bug fixes / features have been added.

  • Change Price Based On Cost – Change the price of a product based on the product cost. This allows you to make the product price +20% of the product cost for example.
  • Change Special Price Based On Cost – Change the special price of a product based on the product cost. This allows you to make the product price +20% of the product cost for example.
  • Change Special Price Based On Price – A bug has been fix that prevented the special price from being changed based on price.

Combining the various price functions allows for some very powerful mass price changes. For example, you may set the produce price to be 50% of the cost. Next, you may set the special price to be -20% of the special price. This can be done across all your products, which saves your valuable time.

Magento Bot Blocker and Anti-Spam Captcha Released

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Anti-Spam Captcha is important for every store because spam reduces productivity, wastes server resources, and can make your site look unprofessional (in the case of spam reviews that advertise other Web sites). Magento Anti-spam Captcha fixes this by putting a CAPTCHA on your most important forms.

The only problem is that CAPTCHAs can annoy users and discourage your customers from performing certain activities. We have worked to solve this by implementing three new features in Spam and Bot Protection:

  • OpenCaptcha Support – Previously, only Google reCAPTCHA was supported, which some users found too difficult. Now we support OpenCaptcha, which is much easy for users to solve while still protecting from bots (reCAPTCHA is still supported for those that want it).
  • Unlocked Actions – After solving 1 CAPTCHA, you may configure for the next X actions to NOT require a CAPTCHA. This means that if a user writes a review on your Web site and solves a CAPTCHA, this will prove they are human. They will not be asked to solve another CAPTCHA until they perform X actions (X more reviews, X more contacts, etc).
  • Only Ask Guests – This feature has always existed, but has been under utilized. With this option only customers who are not logged in will be asked to solve a CAPTCHA. Logged in customers will not be asked.

With these changes we are confident that your store will find a better balance between protection from spammers and bots and between ensuring the user experience of your live, human customers is as good as possible.

Magento Product Feeds Updated

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento product feeds has received a significant update that makes creating feeds much more flexible. Here is a run down of the added features / fixes:

  • New category path attribute flexibility – The attribute “Parent Category > Product Category” now allows you to select your own separator and choose the maximum number of ancestors to show.
  • New output filters – Now you may make a field all lower case or upper case by selecting the upper / lowercase output filter.
  • New image URLs – Image urls will output the uncached image url. This is superior as URLs will not be validated if you flush the media cache.
  • Dynamic attributes enhancement – The default value of a dynamic attribute can now have a transformation type associated with it. For example, you may take the produce price and multiply it by 1.2 (or a tax rate) for certain products.
  • Ultimate customisability – We attempt to meet the requirements of all stores and all feed specifications, but know it is impossible out-of-the-box. For special circumstances where default attributes do not work you may now modify attributes or add your own using the Magento event / observer model.

Magento Javascript / CSS Merging

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Minify JS / CSS 1.2.8 was released today and it includes some very important compatibility features. In previous versions of Magento Minify JS / CSS the order of javascript / CSS was not guaranteed to be the same as before the extension is installed. Now, the order that these files are loaded is guaranteed to be the same as before when selecting the “Never”, “Automatic” and “Always” merging modes. “Automatic (aggressive)”, the previous behavior, can still be used and it will merge more files. The order of loaded files only affects some Magento stores, so try the different merge modes and see which one is best for your store.

In addition, this release solved an issue where the merging of pre-minified files and normal files were causing issues with some browsers. Now pre-minified files are not combined with normal files and this solves the browser issues.

Magento AJAX Cart & Magento Quick View Dialog Centering

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Ajax Cart and Magento Quick View have been updated with new features and a bug fix.

Dialog Centering

Both extensions now have the capability to vertically center the popup dialog. The old behavior of the dialog being at the top of the screen may be achieved by setting the “max top” configuration option to 0. May also set this to other values to better position the dialogs from the top according to your needs.

Transition Effects

This configuration option was available in previous versions of Quick View, but it was not being applied properly. Now both extensions fully support enabling / disabling transition effects.