I’ve been playing with Magento recently putting together a new shopping site for The Ballet Shop and have been pretty impressed with the level of functionality and the stability it offers. Anyway, I’ve got the the point of starting to look at what plugins are available and came across a top list of Magento plugins by Sam Hamilton that I thought I’d echo here for my readers. Here we go:

• Canonical URL’s for Magento – This extension adds the new canonical links to the head of your Magento pages.
• Yoast MetaRobots – There’s no easy way to add meta robots tags to Magento pages, unless of course, when you install this plugin.
• Yoast Blank SEO Theme – This is a clean simplistic SEO optimized Theme based on the core Magento Blank Theme. This theme can be easily customized by professional designers.
• MailChimp ECommerce360 Reporting – The MailChimp Ecommerce Tracking Plugin helps you measure the ROI of your email campaigns. We’ll track when people click from your email campaigns, visit your website, all the way to purchase. Then we’ll aggregate the information and display it on your MailChimp campaign report.
• Dataflow Extension – This module extends the dataflow module, so categories can be added to the product export.
• Auto CrossSell Products – This small extension attempts to automate the product cross sell maintenance. Every time a customer checks out, all products that are in the shopping cart are linked as cross sell products.
• Lazzymonks Twitter – Displays Twitter updates in the menu and allows updates from within the admin panel
• Product Gallery Importer – Product Gallery Importer lets you import products with multiple product images from a CSV file.
• Lazzymonks Google Ads – Adds Google Ads Blocks to the bottom of either the menu
• Fooman Speedster – Speed up your store by combining, compressing and caching JS and CSS.

If you’re playing with Magento give them a try.

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 is a full cumulative update that contains many new features building incrementally upon .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and includes cumulative services updates to the .NET Framework 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.0 subcomponents. The .NET Framework 3.5 Family Update provides important application compatibility updates.

Sounds fairly innocuous, right? Wrong! Besides deploying the fixes to the .NET framework mentioned above, the update also installed a stealth Add-in for FireFox, without any warning, permission or request for consent:

To add insult to injury, not only is the plugin useless (Not compatible with Firefox 3.1b2) as you can see above, but the Uninstall button is actually disabled!

Looks like it’s not a new problem, with reports of Microsoft violating Firefox since last August, but this is now bundled as part of a package that is described as an “Important Update”, rather than a component of development software (Visual Studio) that a person may or may not choose to install.

You can hack your way through uninstalling the plugin, but it’s not the sort of thing someone inexperienced should try. Here are the instructions from the site above:

Against what many people think, though, it can be uninstalled – but by nothing less than hacking the actual registry of Windows! Open your Start Menu and choose Run. Type in regedit and press enter/click OK. Within there, you have to look for something called HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Firefox\extensions and delete the key there (for Windows Vista 64-bit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Mozilla\Firefox\Extensions).

When you have done that, type in about:config in the address bar in Firefox, accept the warning and then remove general.useragent.extra.microsoftdotnet and microsoft.CLR.clickonce.autolaunch.

And, to finish it off, open Windows Explorer and go to \WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Windows Presentation Foundation\DotNetAssistantExtension\ to remove the last remnants of the evil extension.

Instructions thankfully found through Remove the .NET Framework Assistant 1.0 from Firefox

My question to you is this. Granted that Microsoft may “own” the operating system you’re running your software on, but does that give them the right to install additions to non-Microsoft software on your machine? The plugin didn’t work in my case, but let’s say it broke Firefox for me, would Microsoft have acknowledged this was a problem they caused and fixed it? Is it right for them to circumvent any features Mozilla put into Firefox to protect their users and violate their software in this way? Isn’t this the sort of installation route you’d expect malicious software to take?

One of my favourite WordPress plugins: Redirection, has just been upgraded to a brand new version. It’s a complete rewrite and while the functionality is similar to the previous version, the code has been broken down into more modular sections and the UI has had a major overhaul. So what does the plugin allow you to do? Here’s the blurb from the site:

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

Features include:

• Supports both WordPress-based and Apache-based redirections
• 404 error monitoring – captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects
• RSS feed for 404 errors
• Custom ‘pass-through’ redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
• Full logs for all redirected URLs
• Create redirections based upon a URL, browser, referring site, or login status
• Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes
• Full regular expression support
• Fully localized
• Export all redirections to CSV, XML, or Apache .htaccess files
• Import Apache .htacces files

This is probably one of the most useful plugins I have. Recently, I retired my old dasBlog blog and migrated all my posts to WordPress. Unfortunately, the old URLs bear little resemblance to my new ones, but thanks to this plugin I can set up 301 redirects to the new posts pretty easily. I’ve actually donated some cash towards the plugin, it’s THAT good!

Enter Bad Behavior. Bad Behavior (shouldn’t that be Behaviour) is an anti-spam plugin that looks at the requests your website gets and block spam bots from even seeing your site. It’s actually pretty clever and quite comprehensive. For example, if a request hits your website that claims it’s GoogleBot (Google’s way of indexing your website), the plugin checks the IP that the request is coming from, and if it’s not coming from Google, it blocks it. And so on and so forth, it checks every request to make sure it’s legitimate. Once I installed it, spam dropped to a couple a day and it’s been holding there ever since.

So, my final word on spam on WordPress: A combination of Akismet and Bad Behavior is the best solution I’ve used so far!

Except .. there’s already a plugin out there to do that. It’s the most excellent Buy-Me-A-Beer plugin written by Ankesh Kothari. I’ve seen the donation concept on a number of websites, with people collecting for African causes, saving to buy women’s lingerie and even surgical procedures! I always pause to wonder how much money they’ve actually collected, so what I’m doing here is partly experimental too.

Anyway, the plugin’s default is beer and while I enjoy the occasional beer, it’s really coffee that fuels my development work. A latte from our local coffee shop, Java Lounge costs £2.79, and if you click on the link in my sidebar, you can buy me one!

If you have a plugin and want a review, you can just drop them a link and get it review too. I love getting positive reviews

Before my experience, I wouldn’t have recommended installing caching plugins unless you’re receiving substantial traffic (not that I don’t like plugins), but I’m currently rolling it out to any blogs I have that get even 100 page hits a day (just rolled it out to AskOwen). It’s not like I’m listing the list of best diet pills and expecting 1000s of page hits an hour, but I do get a lot of traffic from bots trying to leave spam on the site. Most of those hits tend to be on the home page, so even if a few of those get served out of a cache, it still have a knock-on effect on browsing experience.

My three words to success this week are going to have to be “cache .. cache .. cache”

• Bad Behaviour: Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.
• Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
• wp-cache: Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system.

I’ve also removed the Seesmic plugin seeing no one’s bothered to use it since I installed it.

The other change is that I’ve switched my NoFollow plugin to Lucia’s Link Love which gives me much better control of how the blog thanks commentors for their links.

You can see a full list of plugins I’m using here.

I’ve noticed that the number of spam comments Akismet has cleaned up has decreased substantially since I install Bad Behaviour. This is a plugin that helps ensure that traffic is legitimate and stops bots from even getting as far as your comment page. It’s pretty awesome; much recommended.

? So I installed it and tried it out, and it works extremely nicely. If I was writing a post about bird supplies for example, and needed a picture of a bird, the plugin helps me find one I can use. It took me 3 seconds to find and insert this photo:

photo credit: anna-rchy

(On an aside, that reminds me that a friend of mine asked me to pick up some bird seed for his pet. Almost forgot about it, so will make a note somewhere that I need to visit the pet shop)

I’m pretty impressed! The plugin makes use of images off Flickr because they are covered by a Creative Commons license letting other people make use of them. If you are a commercial entity, the plugin also has an option to only show material that is allowed for commercial work.

Much recommended!