Useful Magento extensions for developers, novice users and others

Posted on Mon February 20, 2012 by Jeroen Derks There have been 0 comments

Magento Connect has many, many extensions, but which of them could be useful for the developers, novice users and other users of Magento? Working with Magento as a developer has led me to some useful extensions to make my life and that of my customers easier.
  • System Config Search by Alan Storm

    This is one of the most useful extensions for novice users. It allows you to search through the system configuration options in the administration area. Not only novice users will benefit from this extension, but also seasoned developers sometimes may forget where exactly certain configuration options are available.
  • Magneto Debug by Sorin Stoiana

    This is also one of the most useful extensions, but then for developers and designers. Using a non-obtrusive element on the frontend you can quickly see:

    • which modules are in use and what versions
    • how long it took to generate the page and how much memory was used
    • the current configuration
    • controller and request data
    • which models have been used for the page
    • which layout configuration was used
    • which blocks were used

  • Image Clean by Defcon2

    For most clients some sort of import is necessary. While importing usually images for products get configured multiple times causing multiple copies in the media/catalog/product folder. Using this extension you can find the images in that directory that cannot be found in the products data and remove them to reclaim diskspace.
  • Clever CMS by Johann Reinke

    If you want to have a simple CMS tree structure, this extension works nicely out of the box. Beware that a copy is made of the current CMS pages upon installation, so if you would uninstall or disable the module your old CMS pages would become visible again.
  • WordPress Integration by FishPig

    If you want to have a more advanced CMS, you can integrate WordPress right into Magento. After some configuration you can quickly have your new or existing (possibly remote) WordPress blog integrated into your Magento website.
  • Module List by Pulse Storm LLC (Alan Storm)

    As all Magento developers and users will know, functionality can be added or modified by installing modules. To have an overview of the installed modules in the administration area, you can use Module List.
  • Vertical Navigation by Rico Neitzel

    The default header menu might suffice, but sometimes the design requires a vertical menu for navigating the catalog. This extension will make that very easy and it's very easy to customise.
  • PHPUnit Testing Integration by EcomDev (Ivan Chepurnyi)

    Recently I came across the quote "If you want to improve your software, don't test more; develop better." However, I do not think that works unless you include testing as part of development. So, to help you out, this extension will help you to write unit tests for your Magento code. It comes with a lot of documentation and you can take a look at the test classes for my EmailImages extension at GitHub.
  • Email Template Adapter by Finn

    One of the things that escape my attention sometimes (although less and less lately) are the emails sent by Magento. Personally I'm not that fond of the configuration of the emails, but since I have discovered this extension, it is very easy to add a design to all outgoing emails.

If you know of an extension that should be mentioned here, please let me know via a comment or email, thanks!


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