Monthly Archives: March 2020

Hello there, Magento fans!

Are you eager to learn about some news and updates we've have prepared for you in March?

Magento 2 Blog Extension

Quite a lot of new features have been implemented to the Magento 2 Blog this month.

There was added the

Creating CMS Blocks in Magento 2 opens a lot of opportunities for you. For example, CMS blocks allow you to share some information with your customers or just make your Magento 2 store pages more interesting and engaging. Magento enables you to create CMS blocks directly from the admin and show them on different pages of your Magento 2 store. 

Follow these steps to create new CMS block in Magento 2:

1. Go to Content > Elements > Blocks and press the Add New Product button.

To apply lazy load for images in your Knockout template, first, make sure that  Magento 2 Image Lazy Load extension is installed.

Then insert an image into the HTML template (my-template.html) like this:

<img data-bind="attr: {src: $parent.getPixelUrl(), 'data-original': thumbnail, alt: code_article, loading: 'lazy', width: '165', height: '165' }"/>

Example:

<div class="options-block" data-bind="foreach: getOptionBlocks(), afterRender: initLazyLoad()">
           <div class="option-item" data-bind="attr: {'data-sku': sku}">
                  <div class="image-block">
                          <img data-bind="attr: {src: $parent.getPixelUrl(),

If you have installed Magefan Auto Language Switcher Extension for Magento 2 and don't know how to test it properly, please follow these simple steps: 

1. Enable all Magento 2 caches

All live sites use enabled caches, so make sure that you have enabled all one when testing.

2. Use Developer (Simulate Geolocation) 

There is an option in Magento 2 Auto Language Switcher that allows you to test the extension performance.  

In Magento 2 Blog v2.9.3 we added the feature that many customers requested about, it is "use the default catalog related products template" instead of custom blog related product template. This helps to display related products on the blog post page in the theme design automatically. The commit related to this change can be found at GitHub.

Unfortunately, there are thousands of themes for Magento 2, and some of them have specific JS and CSS (e.g. Porto Theme). That is why if you use Blog extension v2.9.3 or greater and the related products block does not look good, please try to do next:

1. Create a new file in your theme directory:

app/design/frontend/ThemeVendor/themename/Magefan_Blog/layout/blog_post_view.xml

In case you don't know if your webserver is already configured well and can use WebP, please follow these steps to check:

1. Create a new testwebp.php  file in your Magento 2 root directory.

2. Add this code to it:

<?php 

$errorSufix = '<br/>Please enable it in your hosting configuration or ask the server administrator to help you with this.</strong>';

if (!function_exists('gd_info')) {
   echo ('<strong style="color:red">Error: GD is not enabled in PHP settings.' . $errorSufix);
   exit();
}

$hasWebP = false;
foreach (gd_info() as $key => $value) {
    if (stristr($key, 'webp')) {
        $hasWebP = true;
        break;
    }
}

if (!$hasWebP) {
    echo ('<strong style="color:red">Error: WebP option is not enabled in PHP GD.' . $errorSufix);
    exit();
}

if (!function_exists('imagecreatefromwebp')) {
    echo ('<strong style="color:red">Error: