Fontis Ecommerce Blog: Commerce Advice and Insights

We are pleased to announce the release of version 3.1.6 of the Fontis Australia extension for Magento 1. This is a minor version release of the extension which includes the following changes:

• Adds a new ATL options column to the exported Click & Send CSV file
• Fixes a bug with EXPRESS services

Thanks to Digital Pianism for their contribution.

The Is Anchor category setting and category product positions do not play well when combined together. You might think that marrying two simple category settings would result in a simple solution, but think twice before you do so or you might get a headache of Magento proportion! In this post we will attempt to demystify how Is Anchor works and how you can best make use of it.

How does category positioning work?

You probably know that sorting a category by the default "Best Value" criteria uses the Position field of the products in the category to determine its position in the category listing. This is a whole number value which can be set per product in a category to sort the products in ascending numeric order. Setting a higher position value for a product will move it closer to the bottom of the category list, after all products with the default position of 0.

We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.4 of the Fontis Australia Post API client library for PHP. This is a minor version release of the library which includes the following changes:

• Updated API base URL based on changes in the API
• Locked Guzzle dependency to the latest versions on the 3.x branch, as it is not compatible with newer versions
• Allows parcel weights to be provided using decimal numbers instead of integers

Since Australia Post have deprecated and will eventually decommission the legacy API URL, we encourage all users to upgrade to the latest version soon to avoid any future interruption.

The Fontis Campaign Monitor extension for Magento has been one of our most popular projects, with over 10,000 downloads, and has been used by people all over the world to connect their Magento store with the Campaign Monitor mailing list service. In collaboration with Campaign Monitor we have overhauled the existing extension to be compatible with the latest versions of Magento 1 and the Campaign Monitor API. The extension now also has a new home, having been adopted as the official Campaign Monitor project rather than continuing on as our unofficial third-party solution.

We are pleased to announce the release of version 3.1.5 of the Fontis Australia extension for Magento 1. This is a minor version release of the extension which includes the following changes:

• Moved the admin controller code and changed the URL paths to include "australia_" to try and avoid namespace conflicts with other extensions
• Add configuration to automatically decrypt the Auspost API keys when loading them from config
• Fixed the check for valid Eparcel charge codes
• Updated list of Australia Post PAC service codes
• Various minor code improvements and style fixes

Thanks to Justin Volpato for contributing the updated service codes.

Since the first public versions of the Fontis Blog extension for Magento, we've added a number of important new features culminating in this major version release. It also utilises the recently released Router extension.

The biggest change in version 2 is the addition of support for multiple blogs per store. We realised that the "blog" style of releasing content made sense in many contexts, not just for a typical news feed of posts. Content series such as how to articles, product reviews, press highlights etc. may be better off as separate blogs rather than being combined into a "one-size-fits-all" news feed, where categories or tags within a single blog was previously the only option available. To accommodate this, you can now have as many blogs as necessary, available at whatever URLs are desired.

Today we're releasing a new free Magento extension for developers - Fontis_Router. This is a low-level extension designed to provide better routing for other extensions that want pretty URLs. Its purpose is to stop Magento from automatically routing requests for things like /blog/post/view/id/1. It is then up to the developer to implement their own router class to ensure that only the URLs they want to be considered valid are accepted.