As with any product Magento doesn’t cater to everyones needs out of the box and is missing quite a few things users would expect as standard. Thanks to Magento connect and a decent community following there are extensions and addons that can help you accomplish pretty much anything you like with Magento. There are a few I’ve used and really don’t know what I’d have done with out them, apart from recreating them myself! There are a few musts I install/add any time I use Magento including Fooman’s Speedster which goes a long way to help speeding up Magento and sorting out Magento’s sometimes awful image compression is a must.
This extension can help massively in speeding up Magento page load times and aid in cacheing ultimately resulting in a better experience for your customers. Utilizing the minify library this extension compresses and caches your Javascript and CSS files. There are some downfalls to the extension compatibility-wise, if you don’t have the ability to use mod_rewrite or modify your .htaccess file then this extension won’t work on your installation. Though if you can overcome this and get it installed it really does speed up Magento a noticeable amount.
Showing CMS pages in a dynamic menu
Not exactly an extension and requiring modification of core Magento files this addon allows you to insert a dynamic menu of all your CMS pages. So if you’ve got extra pages such as about, help, contact etc. this plugin rids you of having to manually insert links into your template files. Though if you do follow this post be aware that some of the files have changed but mainly it’s just the odd incorrect line number.
Not a fan of Magento’s default javascript category navigation? This extension is for you! As the name suggests it rids you of the horizontal javascript navigation with a <ul> based list of your categorys that will drill down around 3 levels into your subcategories. Easily customised via the included CSS it’s a really great extension to save alot of time in the development process.
This is one addon to Magento that really should have an option in the backend to change the setting rather than forcing users to modify the core code of Magento. As some of you might have noticed Magento automatically runs an image compression on any product images uploaded, which can sometimes leave your products with awful compression artifacts all over them! Not good for showing off your products. This little change to the code allows you to tailor the compression and leave it barely noticeable with no artifacts at all. Obviously this comes with the caveat of slightly larger image file sizes but I think it’s a small price to pay to get your products looking that little bit better.
Hosts File edit for Local Installs
Some of you developers who prefer to work locally might have experience issues with Magento refusing to log you in from time to time. This is an error cause by the fact that most of the time your local install doesn’t have a period in the name i.e. http://localhost/mymagentoshop so Magento ends up refusing the login. There is a fix for it which involves editing your hosts file to redirect a domain to your localhost, so you’ll end up with something more like http://www.mylocalfakedomain.com/mymagentoshop which Magento assumes is a real URL and allows you to login. It’s a trivial issue but if you’re not familiar with Magento then it can cause a few headaches.
What do you use?
These are just a few bits I find make life easier when working with Magento. Are there any extensions or addons like this for you? Let me know in the comments and hopefully we can make working with Magento that little bit easier!
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Comments ( 8 )
[...] Smith at Creative District has a great write-up about Magento Extensions he could not live without. As with any product Magento doesn’t cater to everyones needs out of the box and is missing [...]
Magento Extensions « SimpleHelix Blog added these pithy words on May 12 09 at 4:57 pmGreat little list of suggestions on here, particularly around the area of improving performance, which is always a good thing.
Russ Back added these pithy words on
Apr 20 09 at
8:10 am
Very useful post, thanks. Having dabbled with Magento a few times just out of interest I am now wanting to get stuck in properly. This post definately saves me a bit of exploration time - cheers!
Gordon
MorayWeb added these pithy words on
Apr 20 09 at
10:13 am
Thanks for the post. Most importantly - the suggestion on speeding up Magento.
Starlit Citadel added these pithy words on
Apr 20 09 at
7:52 pm
These 3 are absolutely must have, despite they are commercial:
http://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/extensions/featured-products.html
http://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/extensions/help-desk-ultimate.html
http://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/extensions/z-blocks.html
Hugo added these pithy words on
Apr 23 09 at
10:08 am
Good post Nathan. I’m really surprised that Varien still haven’t addressed the image compression issue - I don’t think it would be too much work to add an option for this into the config settings.
Oh well, we can but wait I guess!
Paul Younghusband added these pithy words on
Apr 23 09 at
2:24 pm
I really like the Yoast SEO plugins as well:
Metarobots: http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/920
Canonical URLS: http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/906
Blank SEO Theme: http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/974
thaddeusmt added these pithy words on
May 03 09 at
1:22 am
