Category: Magento Extensions

Magento Product Attachments

Extendware Team

Product-Attachment-(for-web)Some products such as electronics, software, appliances, etc, might have electronic user guides, license agreements, and more. Magento Product Attachments will enable you to upload and associate these files with products, so that your customers can download them.

The extension is very simple to use. Attachments can be categorized and can be restricted by user group. Download count statistics can also be shown for each attachment and an attachment can be associated with multiple products.

Here is how an attachment will look on the frontend where customers can download it:

Product Attachments

Quick Extension Overview

Easily associate files with products which make it easy to include user guides, software downloads, and other digital content that might be associated with the product you are selling with Extendware’s Magento Product Attachments extension. The popularity or download count of an attachment is also recorded.

Stopping Spam in Magento

Extendware Team

Spam is very annoying. Unfortunately, running a popular platform like Magento will make your store vulnerable to spam as bots exist that target Magento store. The biggest problem with spam is that it requires you to filter reviewed, support emails, etc, which wastes your time. Fortunately, we have a couple Magento extensions that can reduce spam in your store. There are two basic strategies:

Adding a CAPTCHA to forms

This is the most common strategy to stop automated bots from submitting forms. Our Magento captcha extension is the best solution to this. You can add either a Google reCAPTCHA or an Open Captcha to your contact form. You can also disable it for logged in users so it is less annoying to users.

Creating honey pots to block bad bots

The other strategy is to entice bots to submit data to hidden forms and identify them as a result. Once identified, they can be blocked from your site. Our Magento bot blocker extension accomplishes this for you. In addition, it will rewrite existing forms to make it difficult for automated bots to understand how to submit them. Bot blocker also has the added advantage of preventing bad bots from scraping your site for information as they will be banned once identified.

Quick Extension Overview

Stop spam bots and other bad bots that spam your store and increase your server load by repeatedly crawling your store with Extendware’s Bot Blocker extension. Automated and easy to use solution to block bad bots, free up server resources, and reduce the spam that is sent to your store.

How to Put Magento in Maintenance Mode

Extendware Team

What is Magento Maintenance Mode?

Ideally, maintenance mode is a way to display a nice message to users about your site while maintenance is being conducted. It should allow you and administrators to continue to access the store so you can test features and performance before going live.

What do I need to put my Magento store in Maintenance Mode?

To put Magento into maintenance you will want our Magento Maintenance Mode extension. With this extension you can:

  • Show a friendly message to users indicating the site is in maintenance
  • Ensure that the admin area of the store still works and anyone logged into the admin can view the frontend
  • Whitelist IP addresses using advance rules so particular IP addresses can still view the frontend
  • Show a warning on the frontend to remind you that the store is in offline mode.

How do I put my Store in Maintenance Mode?

The process is simple. Simply follow these steps:

  1. Go to Extendware -> Manage Extensions -> Maintenance Mode -> Configuration in your store backend.
  2. Under the General fieldset set the Status to Enabled. Your store will now be in maintenance mode

Remember, you will need maintenance mode extension in order to accomplish this task.

Quick Extension Overview

Easily put the frontend of your store in maintenance mode while you are working on your store. Logged in administrators and anyone on your IP whitelist can easily access the frontend of the store even when in Magento Maintenance Mode.

How to Disable Magento extensions

Extendware Team

It is common when improving your Magento store that you will install new Magento extensions and sometimes you will need to troubleshoot an issue. The best way to do this is to disable extensions and see if they contribute to a particular issue. If you disable an extension and the issue disappears, then it could be the extension contributes to the issue.

How NOT to disable a Magento extension

There are many resources online that will tell you to go to System -> Configuration -> Advanced in order to disable a Magento extension. This will NOT disable the extensions! The only thing this can do is disable the extensions output. The extension will still be running in the background and could be causing issues with your store. In fact, disabling its output could cause even more issues.

How to disable a Magento extension the right way

To disable it correctly is quite simple. Just follow these simple steps:

  1. Go to System -> Cache Management in your backend
  2. Select all caches and set their status to disabled. This ensures that when you disable an extension the cache will not interfere and if you need to re-enable it quickly you will be able to do it.
  3. Open the extensions xml file in [Magento root]/app/etc/modules and you will see xml in the file like the following:

    Change the true to false and it should be disabled.

The really easy way to disable a Magento extension

Are you the proud user of an Extendware Magento extension? Then we provide you a very easy way to disable extensions in your store that will handle the cache, dependencies, and more when disabling. All you need to do is go to Extendware -> Manage Extensions -> Overview, find the extension and click it, and on the next page change its Status to Disabled and save.

How to Display Latest Products on Home Page

Extendware Team

You might have noticed when browsing our Magento extensions that we display the list of new products on our home page. In order to do this we are our using our Magento product sorting extension.

To create something similar on your site, all you need to do is follow these steps:

  1. Go to CMS -> Pages in your Magento backend
  2. Click on whichever CMS page is your homepage
  3. Click the Design tab to edit the design of the page
  4. Add the following XML to the design:

There are a few lines from this xml code that you can edit in order to better serve your needs:

You can specify to only show products within a certain category. To do that, you will want to uncomment this line. You can replace the category ID with any category ID from teh store

This is the number of products displayed in a row when viewed in grid mode. You can change the number to any number you want.

This is the most important line and is what will determine how the products are sorted. In this instance we are sorting by creation. As a result, newest products will display first. You can also sort by bestseller, popularity, revenue per view, revenue per order, featured, review count, and more. More information is in the user guide of the Magento product sorting extension.

Magento Ajax Cart Up-selling Support to Increase Sales

Extendware Team

Our Magento Ajax Cart Extension has had a lot of features and fixes recently. Here is a run down:

Up-selling ability Now the Magento Ajax Cart extension has the ability to list up-sell, cross-sell, related, also viewed, or also bought pages on the success page. This enables you to increase sales by putting products in front of your customers that they are likely to want to purchase.

Mobile / small screen support Before the Ajax Cart would show dialogs in a fixed position on the screen. This works great on a desktop, but on a mobile device or small screen it is possible that the dialog would not be close-able and no ability to scroll the page to close the dialog as the dialog would auto-position. Now the dialog does not auto-position. This way its possible for smaller screens to scroll and close it.

Add to cart on cart page Adding to cart from the cart page is now supported. This is mainly useful if a cross-sell block is shown on the cart page.

Have a look at the Ajax Cart product page and try the demo to see it in action!

Quick Extension Overview

Magento AJAX Cart will change the way your customers interact with your store by making adding and deleting cart, compare and wishlist items AJAX-ified. It works for all product types, has many customization options, and will increase your store’s usability and appearance.

Magento Affiliate Program Extension Released!

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Affiliate Program for Magento has been released! Do you want to take your sales to a new level? Then you need to start an affiliate program. No matter how many sales people you hire it will never compare to 100s of motivated, commission-based, individual affiliates that concentrate on selling your products to their existing contact lists. That is the power of an affiliate network.

We offer a complete solution that gives you the tools to manage your own affiliate network. Easily setup affiliate accounts and create banners so they can begin advertising your store. Your affiliates can easily view statistics and create links in their backend, so they can see the results of their campaigns.

Why is an affiliate program better? An affiliate program is better than most other forms of advertising as it is result-based. You only need to pay your affiliates when they produce sales. There is no risk to you as they will not be paid unless they generate revenue for your store. Compare this to google advertising and other forms of advertising where you have to pay whether sales are generated or not!

Have a look at the Magento Affiliate Program Extension to get started!

Quick Overview

Easily create an affiliate network, so that your store is promoted around the clock. Our affiliate extension is highly configurable. Easily create multiple campaigns / programs, multiple commission rates, multiple commission tiers, and banners. Start your affiliate network today so your store can grow!

Magento Full Page Cache Improvements

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Full Page Cache for Magento has made many, many improvements recently. We have made small changes such as increased form key support and secure cookie support and large changes such as multi-level cache backends and faster secondary cache. Here is a run down of the two most important changes:

Multi-Level Cache Backends – Do you want to use a fast memory based cache such as memcached / apc / xcache but you do not have enough memory to store the whole site in memory? Or, perhaps you need tagging support? Multi-level cache backends will come to your rescue. It allows hybrid caches such as a Memcached / File hybrid that gives you the benefit of a memory based backend with the large storage capabilities of the File backend. In addition, it will give Tagging support for memcached / apc / xcache.

Faster Secondary Cache – The secondary cache is the cache-level that displays dynamic content such as cart contents when using the full page cache. The latest page cache includes important changes to the secondary cache that allows it to be 2-3 times faster than it was before and further reduces database queries.

Quick Overview

Extendware’s Full Page Cache reduces your Magento store’s First Byte Time, Increases your web server request rate, reduces database load, and makes your store much more responsive. Extendware’s Caching solution is the best Magento Caching Performance Extension you can buy to speed up your store and easily pays for itself by saving you money rather than buying expensive hardware solutions to increase your Magento store optimization rates.

Magento Store / Currency Switcher Released

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Store / Currency Switcher gives your customers a more localized and personalized shopping experience by automatically redirecting customers to the proper store and currency based on their geographic location. If you sell to markets that use different currencies or different languages, then it is important that customers view the correct currency / store view.

Common auto-switching scenarios:

  • Auto-switch to your region specific stores. European visitors can go to your European store, Indian visitors to your Indian store, US visitors to your US store, etc
  • Auto-switch to language-specific stores. Customers from Spanish speaking countries will view your Spanish language store, English speakers will see your English language store, etc.
  • Auto-switch to the currency of your customers. US visitors will see dollars, Europeans will see Euros, etc.

Note: This extension is compatible with our Magento Full Page Cache extension. 

Quick Overview

Extendware’s Magento Store / Currency Switcher Make your store more personalized and easier to use by gracefully redirecting customers to the proper store and currency based on their geographic location and browser configuration. Easy and flexible rules give you full control on switching. Compatible with full page cache systems.

 

Magento Improved Indexing – Faster Magento Admin Backend

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Improved Indexing helps make the backend more responsive. Many stores will discover that in time the saving of products, categories, and other items becomes slow. The more products / stores that you have the slower it can become. This is a big issue because time is money. Employees will do less work in the same amount of time if the admin backend is slower.

Improved Indexing will perform index operations in the backend. Index operations is a large part of why product saving is slow. The end result is a more responsive backend that allows you and your employees to get more work done.

What are the expected results? This depends on a large variety of factors. Most stores will see around 2-18 seconds time-savings per saved product. The more products you have, the more overloaded your mysql database, the more stores you have, etc, will mean more savings.

Quick Extension Overview

Increase the speed of your administrative backend. Do you have a slow admin backend when saving products, categories, etc? Improved Indexing will speed up your admin backend by making the saving of products, categories, etc more responsive. The end result is that you can get more work done in less time.