Magento Extension Roundup - November 2017

Magento's checkout success page can be hard to test. It's only shown when you complete the checkout process, and only once per checkout. If you try to refresh the success page, you'll be redirected to the cart. If you're adjusting the styles or content on the success page, having to place a new order every time you want to see the success page is very cumbersome.

This extension allows you to easily test the success page. An admin panel interface in the store configuration section allows you to specify an order number and then view the success page for that order. The link generated is only valid for a configurable period, which makes this safer to use on live sites.

However, one thing to watch out for would be any tracking code that runs on your success page. If you keep viewing the success page for the same order, any tracking code will be triggered multiple times. To avoid potentially interfering with your live data, you may want to limit use this extension to your development environment.

This extension adds a new product type: donations. These are intended to make it easy for customers to donate to charities or other organisations. As well as appearing in categories like other products, they can also automatically be displayed on the homepage, in category sidebars or in other locations. When a customer clicks on one a donation product, a lightbox is shown with donation amount options. The donation product is then added to the cart and handled like any other product.

Donation products are similar to virtual products in that they don't require shipping, don't have a weight and don't track stock levels. The extension allows configuring the fixed donation amounts and allowed custom amount ranges, as well as where donation products are displayed.

Magento allows you to very easily create product attributes, but if you use this feature carelessly you can end up with a lot of them. This extension checks how many products actually have a value set for each attribute and optionally deletes any that aren't used. This could be helpful if you're trying to clean up attributes in a long-running a Magento store, or if an automated process had created unnecessary attributes.

The cleanup process runs as a Magento cron job, which can be triggered manually using a tool like n98-magerun. By default it only logs information about attributes that could be deleted to a file. A config setting can be changed to have it actually delete the attributes. Even though the dry-run mode should give you a good idea of what attributes the extension would delete, we recommend backing up your database before doing an active run.

This is a small extension that adds a coloured bar to the top of the admin panel to indicate which environment administrators are viewing. It can be easy to get your development and production sites mixed up when they all look very similar, and this can lead to costly mistakes. Adding an indicator bar helps avoid this.

The extension is straightforward and is controlled by config settings. Out of the box it supports three environments (development, pre-production and production), but it wouldn't be hard to extend. It does include an 'Easygento' logo in the indicator bar, which would require customisation if you wanted to remove it.