Fontis Ecommerce Blog: Commerce Advice and Insights

While developing the new Fontis Blog extension, we wanted to allow use of the same WYSIWYG editor tools that users have when creating Magento CMS pages or static blocks. Doing so is not very difficult, requiring only a few changes to add the Magento WYSIWYG to your own extensions.

The first step is tell Magento that it can load the TinyMCE WYSIWYG JavaScript file. This should be done in the layout, in the handle used for your page, like so:

As part of our ongoing work on Mercator (a Magento Community Edition distribution launched last year), we have released a demo Vagrant box, available for immediate download. Mercator has recently been updated to merge changes from the Magento CE 1.9.0.1 release, and now includes features such as a streamlined checkout, responsive design using the Bootstrap framework, and improved search functionality. Rather than having to set up a development environment and install Mercator, the box is fully configured and ready for use. The box runs Mercator on HHVM, includes services like Redis and Elasticsearch pre-installed and configured, and uses the Magento CE 1.8 sample data.

Fontis is pleased to announce the release of Mercator, a community driven distribution of Magento. The Magento community has matured to the point where an amazing number of valuable open source contributions have been released, and Mercator expands upon the Community Edition feature set by bringing together the best of these extensions into a cohesive distribution. Code is now on GitHub, and already includes a number of additional features in its initial commit that have been integrated through community extensions.

Blogs are a great tool for businesses to engage with customers and publicise the latest products, promotions and services through their website, and eCommerce websites are of course no exception. There are a number of solutions for Magento that have been around for quite a long time now, but we feel there's still room for improvement when it comes to a native extension, and that's why we're pleased to announce the release of the Fontis Blog extension for Magento. With source now available on GitHub and as a package on the Fontis Blog Magento extension page, it provides a built-in blogging platform for Magento using familiar admin panel content management features.

This week saw the inaugural Click Frenzy sale generate a huge amount of interest in Australian eCommerce, and we are proud to have been the developer responsible for delivering the website for the event based on a Magento platform.

The site stood up well after a challenging start on Tuesday evening, but there was a configuration issue with the webserver environment at one point which left a number of private application files exposed for some time. During this period the Magento directory was inadvertently left with directory listings on and without private directories and their contents protected from access. These private files being accessible did not result in a security breach of any kind, and there was never any sensitive personal data stored on any of the website's servers, but the cause of the disclosure does highlight a risk of Magento’s design. Currently, the entire application is designed to be located in the webserver’s document root (docroot). To address this risk and eliminate the possibility of a misconfiguration having this effect, the Magento application needs to be restructured to make it possible to relocate most parts outside of the docroot. This is an approach we’ll be adopting in future and which we document in this post. We also include an accompanying patch that we are releasing to the Magento community.

We have just released an important update to the Fontis Westpac extension, which should be installed by all merchants using the PayWay service. The update includes a new Verisign certificate for the PayWay gateway which will be required in order to continue connecting to the gateway. Merchants who will be affected by this update should have already been contacted by Westpac.

In addition, we have added another small but often requested feature, and added in a credit card type selection box to the PayWay and QuickGateway settings pages in the Magento configuration. Merchants will now be able to easily configure whether they want to accept American Express, Discover and others.

Since version 1.11, Magento Enterprise Edition releases have included a RMA feature to help manage this process. The system supports tracking requests from when they are first created by a customer, all the way through to resolution. This post will look at how to set up and administer RMA requests from the admin panel, and will also detail a few shortcomings that will hopefully be improved in future releases.

A successful Magento implementation requires not only development expertise and an understanding of its internals and various settings, but also systems administration knowledge to ensure that the hosting environment is configured correctly and for optimal performance. As a store owner or developer who may not be familiar with all of these areas themselves, it can therefore be difficult to check on the overall quality of a particular installation. How can the relative “health” of a Magento store be quickly and easily assessed? Introducing MageAudit, the Magento Health Check.