In this Magento extension round-up, we quickly review some of the free extensions that were released in April. The theme for this month's extensions are small, drop-and-go extensions with minimal conflicts in your Magento installation.
Email Spellcheck by ArchApps
Customers who complete the checkout with an invalid email address can be costly in both time and money for the merchant to resolve.
This extension helps customers detect typos in their email address by validating their email address using the popular mailcheck.js Javascript library. In the case of an invalid email, the customer is provided with suggestions on how to correct the error. This extension has the added bonus of optionally validating email inputs in the admin panel.
A small and useful extension that contains no rewrites and can dropped into a Magento installation without any conflicts. Consider adding this extension to your website if you require robust email validation.
View on Magento ConnectContact Departments by ArchApps
This extension allows your customers to choose which department to send their contact enquiry by adding a dropdown list to the "Contact Us" page. The departments shown in the dropdown list are customisable in the admin panel and can be configured on a store by store basis.
This extension requires an addition of a single line to a template, but should otherwise be easy to drop into your Magento installation. There are no rewrites, so there should be no conflicts with other extensions.
View on Magento ConnectFfm Coupondropdown Extension by Sander Mangel
When creating a new order in the admin panel, merchants may need to apply coupons to the order. Magento provides a text input to allow admin users to enter the coupon code and apply it to the order. However, it can be tedious to remember which coupons codes to use.
This extension replaces the text input with a dropdown list which contains all active coupons, thus removing the need for the merchant to remember coupon codes.
This is a small quality-of-life extension that is unlikely to conflict with other extension. Consider including this extension into your Magento installation if your store utilises many coupons.
View on GitHubMagento1-SingleProductCategoryRedirect by Rouven Alexander Rieker
The repository's README has a good explanation of the extension's motivation and behaviour:
"It's frustrating for a customer if he visits a shop category which contains only one product and where he has to click one more time to see the product.
This module adds the functionality that it redirects the customer directly to the product if the customer navigates to a category with only one product."
When looking at this extension, one should take into consideration the user experience of the customer and the potential impact on SEO. A customer that clicks on a category link might expect to be presented with a category page. If a product page is shown instead, the customer could be left confused since it's not likely to be evident why the behaviour for this type of category link would be different. Search engines could be similarly confused if they see a URL which sometimes redirects to a different page, but other times has content on it.
All that being said, this is a small and straight forward extension that does its stated purpose well. It is has no rewrites or overrides and is unlikely to cause conflicts with other extensions.
View on Github