# Magento Extension Roundup - September 2018
In this month's Magento extension round-up, we look at some recent Magento 2 extensions that optimise your store's
 URL rewrites, notify external channels of store events, enable an enhanced FAQ page and allow customers to add
 comments to their orders.

Magento 2

 URL Rewrite Optimiser
 by Fisheye

 License:
 MIT

 Version Reviewed:
 1.0.2

 An important part of SEO is making sure URLs are both descriptive and readable. Magento achieves this by
 maintaining a list of readable URLs consisting of "slugs", and the canonical URLs that they map to. For
 each product page, multiple URL rewrites are generated: one consisting of the product's unique slug by
 itself, and one for each category path that the product can be found in. This adds up to a lot of URL
 rewrites. In fact, for most Magento stores, the URL rewrite table is the largest in the database by a wide
 margin!

 Interestingly, Magento has a "Use Categories Path for Product URLs" setting, but it has no effect on the
 URL rewrites that are actually generated for each page. If this setting is disabled, the category path
 variants of product page URLs are still created, unnecessarily consuming a large amount of storage space
 and even degrading site performance. This is where the URL Rewrite Optimiser extension comes in: with this
 extension installed, disabling the above setting will also prevent these unused URL rewrites from being
 generated. As the setting is unlikely to be changed frequently, stores with larger catalogues stand to
 benefit significantly from this.

 As mentioned in its README file, the extension doesn't currently remove existing URL rewrites. To perform
 this clean-up manually, consider using the 

 Regenerate URL Rewrites

 extension.

 View on GitHub

 BlaBla
 by n98 Hackathon

 License:
 Beerware

 Version Reviewed:
 1.0.0

 The BlaBla extension allows Magento to notify external channels when certain events occur. Specifically,
 notifications for the following events can be individually enabled:

 A customer is created
 An order is placed
 A search returns no results
 An email is sent from the "Contact Us" page

 The initial version of the extension supports sending notifications to Slack, Discord or HipChat (which was

 recently acquired by Slack
 ).
 The extension's modular design also makes it easy for developers to enable additional
 integrations by writing custom classes that implement the extension's

 channel interface
 .
 If your organisation already uses online collaboration software, BlaBla could be a useful way to complement
 Magento's existing email notifications.

 View on GitHub

 Easy FAQ
 by MageWorld

 License:
 OSL 3.0

 Version Reviewed:
 1.0.0

 A Frequently Asked Questions page is an

 effective way

 of providing information about your store's products and/or services while addressing common customer
 queries. As many users address their questions directly to search engines, an FAQ page can even give your
 store an SEO boost! Plus, when users can find the answers to their questions on a dedicated page, they're
 less likely to generate repetetive customer support requests.

 Creating an FAQ section as a CMS page is already straightforward, but the Easy FAQ extension offers a more
 robust solution. The extension makes it easy to manage questions and sort them into categories, while the
 user experience is enhanced through features such as expandable/collapsable questions and a search field
 for finding questions by keyword. There's also a setting that allows you to modify the FAQ page's layout.

 View on GitHub

 Order Comment
 by Evince Development

 License:
 OSL 3.0

 Version Reviewed:
 2.0.0

 For some stores, it might be desirable to allow customers to add an arbitrary comment to their order in the
 checkout. This comment could be used to convey special packaging instructions or additional delivery
 information. The Order Comment extension does just this: a "Leave a Comment" field is added to the
 checkout, and the comment is shown when viewing the order in the admin panel.

 While this extension may be useful for general order comments, there is currently no setting for
 configuring the label used for the comment field in the checkout. This makes it less suitable for comments
 that are intended to serve a specific purpose (e.g. special packaging instructions only). As an alternative,
 it may be possible to achieve the desired outcome by adding

 customisable options 

 to your store's products.

 View on GitHub