Fontis Ecommerce Blog: Commerce Advice and Insights

Happy Australia Day everyone! Six years after our last Australia Day release, the extension is still going strong and we are celebrating again this year with the release of the first version of the Fontis Australia extension for Magento 2. This initial release of the Australia extension includes the Australian regions and the BPAY and direct deposit payment methods. An Australia Post shipping method is not included with this first release, but will be added in a later version along with the rest of the features from the Magento 1 extension.

Looking to manage remarketing code or other third-party services on your site, without needing a developer to make every change? Tag Manager is a free service from Google which aims to address this common problem and give you the ability to easily add tags for Google Analytics, AdWords, tracking pixels and more. The Fontis Google Tag Manager extension for Magento will automatically export common Magento data so that it can be used in GTM.

Today we are releasing version 2.0 of the Fontis Composer Autoloader extension for Magento, which is designed to let you use any Composer dependency within Magento. This release includes changes so that you no longer need to fire an extra event to use it for code that doesn't run during a normal Magento web request, such as a shell script.

These changes make the extension more generally applicable and mean developers no longer need to worry about whether Composer dependencies will be loaded differently based on environment. The way in which we've implemented this extension also means there is no need to patch or modify core files.

PHP and Magento development has matured in the past few years. One of the biggest advances has been the widespread adoption of Composer, which has established itself as a de facto standard for the management of PHP packages and libraries. Though Composer doesn't immediately lend itself to the management of Magento extensions, the Magento developer community quickly realised the value of doing so and worked together to release the impressive magento-composer-installer. This adds support for managing Magento extensions with Composer, which can make the process of managing versions and dependencies in a Magento installation much easier.

DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service provided by Amazon, offering features like easy scalability, high availability and data durability. These properties make it well suited to being used as a Magento session storage engine. The AWS PHP SDK already includes a PHP session handler, so in theory it should be a simple matter of including the SDK and configuring Magento to use it. In practice, it wasn't quite this straightforward.