Fixing front controller reached 100 router match iterations

Extendware Team

The problematic Magento Front controller reached 100 router match iterations exception is not a common issue, but it is certainly a big issue to the usability of a store and can be difficult to solve.

Where is this Magento exception thrown?

In app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Front.php inside of the dispatch() function. The following code snippet will give you an idea:

When is this exception thrown?

This exception is thrown whenever Magento cannot find a proper route for a request. In general, it should always be able to match a request with the router that handles 404 Not Found requests. As a result, in practice, this exception is only triggered when Magento has properly failed to generate routers or the cache has become corrupted.

How to solve this issue?

In our experience, there are two primary causes:

  1. CMS Module Disabled – The CMS module handles 404 not found requests which is the fallback router. As a result, if this module is disabled, then no router may be found. To resolve, simply enable the CMS module
  2. Cache is Corrupted – It could be the Magento cache became corrupted. In this case, the list of routers never gets loaded since it tries to load from cache and the cache does not have this data. As a result, fully flushing the Magento cache will resolve this issue.

Magento eliminate render-blocking JavaScript

Extendware Team

Defer loading of javascript can significantly decrease the page load of your Magento store. Magento uses a lot of javascript and the browser will wait for this javascript to completely download before it renders the page. Now, the Magento Minify Javascript / CSS can eliminate render-blocking javascript.

Site Optimizer already will increase your site speed by minifying javascript / css / html and merging your js / css and even optimizing your images and putting forever expiries on your resources. Javascript deferred loading is the next step to fully optimize your store speed. Our deferred loading technology will work out-of-the-box with all of our Magento extensions and default magento. It will also work with many 3rd party extensions without any modifications.

In addition to javascript deferment we have updated the Site Optimizer with other under-the-hood improvements such as optimizing media images that are inside of cms pages and static block content.

Quick Extension Overview

Speed up your site, improve your search engine site rankings and conversion rate, and improve your user experience in the process. Minify Js / CSS extension reduces page size, bandwidth, request count, and server load without anything more than installing this easy to use and feature-full 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.

Magento Lucene Search Released

Extendware Team

Your Magento store product search allows customers to find the products they want quicker. Customers will leave your store if they cannot find the products they want. Around 43% to 50% of e-commerce customers use site search to find the products . Your store is losing a lot of potential sales if your search is slow or returning poor results.

Magento Lucene is a fast and precise search backend that is compatible with shared hosts. It includes lots of features and comes with a 30 day refund guarantee – we are that confident.

How important is fast site search?

A customer will not be able to order products from your store if they cannot find them. Relevant results matter and Lucene Search will make your results more relevant and faster. According to Gomez, every second delay in site load time results in a 7% reduction in revenue. Forrester research has found that 52% of people consider speed to be important to their site loyalty. It is well-established that faster and more relevant search results will improve a stores revenue.

Quick Extension Overview

Extendware’s Magento Lucene Search increases revenue and customer satisfaction with faster, more relevant search results. Lucene Search is a powerful and flexible search solution that helps ensure your customers can always find the products they want. Plug and play configuration and compatible with shared hosting environments.

 

Magento Abandonded Cart Reminder Blacklist

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Abandoned Cart Reminder is a powerful extension that enables you to capture lost sales by e-mailing customers automatic followups after abandoning their cart. Based on feedback from customers, we have added two new features recently to make this extension even more powerful:

  1. Unsubscribe / E-mail Blacklist – nothing is worse than when a customer receives unwanted e-mail and they become annoyed. In addition, not allowing customers to unsubscribe might be illegal in various jurisdictions. As a result, we now allow customers to unsubscribe from cart reminder e-mails so they never receive them anymore. In addition, you may place emails on the unsubscribe list in the backend. This ensures only customers who want to receive the emails (and potential discounts) will receive them.
  2. Customer Group Disabling – some customers have both a retail and wholesale shop. Abandoned cart reminder most likely should only be used on the retail shop. Now you can disable some customer groups from receiving reminders, so that wholesale customers will not receive the reminders.

To learn more about Magento Abandoned Carts review our Magento Extensions.

Quick Extension Overview

Our Magento Abandoned Cart Email extension allows you to capture additional sales by emailing customers who have abandoned their shopping cart without making a purchase. You can send an unlimited number of follow-up emails to the potential customer and even attach an automatically generated coupon to the follow-up email in order to incentivize a new purchase. Learn more about Extendware’s Abandoned Cart Reminder Extension at our website.

 

Magento Product Feeds Updated

Extendware Team

Extendware’s Magento Product Feed allows store owners to create feeds for various shopping sites (google, shopping.com, yahoo, etc) with ease. Over the last month we have been making a lot of under the hood changes to the extension to bring even more ease of use and capabilities to our valued customers.

Here are some recent changes to our Product Feed extension:

  1. Multi-attribute fields – sometimes you need to combine various product attributes to create a search optimized field value for a shopping site. The most common use case would be creating better product names which enhance visibility in the product search engine. For example, you could combine the manufacturer, category, and more with the product name. Here at Extendware we could do something like this “{{var name}} for {{var platform}}” to make a feed field look like this for Feed Creator Pro: “Feed Creator Pro for Magento”. The possibilities and flexibility are endless!
  2. Filtering on dynamic attributes – Dynamic attributes allow the creation of new product attributes that change based on the value of other product attributes. Now it is possible to exclude products from the feed based on the value of a dynamic attribute
  3. Price output types – you can now set the output type for a field to be “price”. This will ensure the outputted number has no more than 2 decimal places and if desired will also format the price with the currency symbol.
  4. Filtering on empty – if you filter a product attribute and leave the filter value empty, then it will both match empty values and null values. Previously there was not way to match null values

We highly recommend upgrading to the latest releases and be sure to check back as we are constantly adding new features! Also, be sure to check out the Magento Product feeds page for full feature details.

Quick Extension Overview

Extendware’s Magento Product Feed easily creates product feeds for a variety of services such as Google, Yahoo, Shopping.com, and more. The end result is increased exposure for your products and increased revenue as a result. Compatible with XML and CSV / TXT feed formats.