Page 5 - Monthly Archives: 2022

Hello Magento fans,

This month we’ve released lots of new features to continue making our extensions better for you.

Let's start!

Magento 2 Blog Extension

New features of the Magento 2 Blog Extension!

First and foremost we've added an option to assign a blog author to a specific store view or website (Blog Extra). We have also added other options: post sorting by End Date (Blog Extra), and post SORT BY option for the recent blog posts widget.

Regarding the compatibility changes, we've added the compatibility with the latest Amasty XML Sitemap extension and the compatibility of GraphQL with PWA Studio v12.6.0. The support for capitalized tag names is available in the latest release.

We have also fixed the "Cannot instantiate abstract class AbstractResource" error on CSV/XML import (Blog Extra).

The blog's become a little better this month with more changes yet to come.

Magento 2 SEO Extension

New features of the Magento 2 SEO Extension!

Better SEO is the ultimate goal of every business

It's not a secret website speed is one of the most important SEO ranking factors not only because of the loading itself, but its influence on customer experience. That's why you have to constantly test website speed with different tools to determine the issues slowing down your Magento 2 store.

The most common tool everyone is familiar with is Google PageSpeed Insights or PSI. It runs your URL through Google's servers and provides a report on how your website is doing.

Today we want to turn your attention to the "Defer Offscreen Images" that often holds your website from getting into the PSI green zone. We'll discuss what it means and how you can fix it to speed up Magento.

What is "Defer Offscreen Images" Message?

"Defer Offscreen Images" is the message displayed in Google PageSpeed Insights that lists all images that should be lazy loaded on the requested URL. It also shows the potential size savings you'll get from lazy loading these images. The complete description from Google looks

Magento experts work hard to improve Magento security with each release so that your store and customer data are in no danger. However, even if you're 100% confident in your Magento admin security, there is no harm in taking extra actions to ensure it's protected from any kind of violations. 

So, we've gathered the best tips on how you can improve your Magento 2 store security and provide a safe environment for your customers.

1. Use Magento Security Scan Tool

Configure Magento Security Scan Tool. It's better to prevent the problem from appearing than solve it. Magento security scan Tool does exactly that. It allows you to monitor possible security risks, unauthorized accesses and malware so that you can improve your website security by taking care of the issues before they appear.

2. Create Unique Admin Panel Route

Never use "/admin/" or any other common path as a route (front name) to your Magento 2 admin panel. This is insecure and increases your chances of becoming a brute force

Message from the Magefan CEO, Ihor Vansach:

Today we celebrate the 31st Anniversary of Ukrainian Renewed Independence. For the last 400 years Ukrainians were fighting for their independence, and this fight, unfortunately, continues.

When we celebrated the 30th Anniversary of Ukrainian Renewed Independence last year we couldn’t even imagine what terrible things will happen to our beautiful country in 6 months. Since russia started its war and brought tragedy to our land on February 24, 2022, our working processes have stopped only for a few days. Each of us has found inner strength and could put ourselves together (although it was dramatically hard emotionally) to keep working.

The war that russia began against our country changed our mindsets and life values. We value our loved ones more than ever before, we value our neighbourhoods, more than ever before, we value the opportunity to work in our undamaged office more than ever before, and we most important love Ukraine more than ever before.

Our Magento Blog Extension is a robust marketing tool that allows you to promote your products and build a community around your brand. And although it offers you a lot of SEO features, internal blog links are not something the module can cover for you.

According to the Magento SEO guide, linking relevant pages together will pass the link juice across these pages. But not only that. It also improves customers' experience and helps search robots to understand your website structure better. 

So, in this article, you'll learn how to add links across multiple blog posts in literally a few clicks. You'll need to resort to the Magento 2 SEO solution to configure automatic internal links in the blog.

To enable automatic internal links in Magento 2 Blog: 

1. Navigate to Stores > Configuration > Magefan Extensions > SEO > Cross Links and make sure Magefan Blog Post Content is selected to be used for Auto Cross Links. 

2. Go to Marketing > Seo&Search > Cross Links and press the Add Cross Link

Setting up special price in Magento 2 is one of many ways to provide discounts and boost conversion rates in your store. Since sales always drive customers' attention and make them come back regularly, you need to know how to leverage them to your benefit.

So, in this guide, you'll learn more about special prices in Magento 2 and how to configure and edit them in bulk or gather all products on sale into one category.

You set up a special price to put a product on sale. It is displayed instead of the regular price with the regular price notation. However, except for the product page, it is also displayed in a catalogue.

Set Up Magento 2 Special Price

1.Navigate to Catalog > Products and choose the product you want to configure a special price for.

2. Scroll down to the Price field and click on Advanced Pricing.

3. Enter the Special

Working on the Magento store is not that easy either for developers or admins whatever task they're engaged in. And though Magento 2 errors are something one never wants to meet, you may encounter them when installing Magento extensions, updating Magento, creating multiple product-related requests, running some script or file with no execute permissions, etc.

These errors in Magento might range from harmless to quite complex influencing your website performance and customer experience. However, in most cases, they're relatively easy to handle if you detect why they appear timely. 

So this article is a breakdown of the most common Magento errors you can run into. Knowing the causes, types of the errors and where to find error logs helps you avoid them in the future. 

Magento error 1: Access Denied

Magento Access Denied HTTP error 403 most commonly appears in the Magento admin panel. It occurs when you try to access a page you don't have permission to enter because of the wrong credentials

Magento catalog price rules is one of the greatest built-in marketing tools the platform provides. They allow you to implement discounts and run sale campaigns more easily without any third-party implementations, same as cart price rules.

So, in this article, you will learn everything you need to know about Magento 2 catalog price rules, how to configure them and what differentiates them from the cart price rules.

Without any further ado, let's dive in and define what stands by catalog rules.

What is Magento Catalog Price Rule?

Magento catalog price rule is a set of conditions based on customer group, product attributes, and other conditions you use to assign discounts to products in the catalog.

If the product falls under conditions of the catalog prices rule, the discount is applied to it and displayed directly in the catalog.

Due to that, catalog price rules don't use coupon codes and customers see discounts while browsing through your store. This encourages them to purchase more.

If you decided to remove Magento Google Shopping Feed, please follow the steps below. You can contact our team for a free consultation in case you have any issues with Magefan's extension.

Remove Extension Files

Removing files instruction depends on the way the Google Shopping Feed extension has been installed in.

1. If you can find the extension files in the folder

app/code/Magefan/GoogleShoppingFeed

then remove this folder.

2. If the extension was installed via the composer and its files located in the folder

vendor/magefan/module-google-shopping-feed

then run composer CLI command to remove it

composer remove magefan/module-google-shopping-feed

Once extension files have been removed, run these Magento CLI commands:

php bin/magento setup:upgrade
php bin/magento setup:di:compile
php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy

Remove Extension Data (optional)

Attention!

If you need to update Magento Google Shopping Feed by Magefan, please follow the steps below.

Update using composer 

If the Google Shopping Feed module was installed via the composer (check if vendor/magefan/module-google-shopping-feed folder exists), then you need to run these simple CLI commands in Magento 2 directory:

composer remove magefan/module-google-shopping-feed
composer require magefan/module-google-shopping-feed ^x.x.x
# replace x.x.x with the version you want to use
php bin/magento setup:upgrade
php bin/magento setup:di:compile
php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy

Update using archive and FTP 

If the Google Shopping Feed module was installed via FTP (check if app/code/Magefan/GoogleShoppingFeed folder exists), then follow these

You can install Magento Google Shopping Feed by Magefan, using composer or archive installation methods.

Installation via composer (recommended)

Please navigate to your Magefan Account > My Downloads > Install via Composer to get the composer installation instructions.

Hello Magento fans! We have prepared a mid-summer list of Magefan news and updates for you since there were quite a lot of changes this month.

So with no further ado, let's start.

Magento 2 XML Sitemap Extension

New Magento 2 XML Sitemap Extension!

SEO is a complex concept that requires time and effort to optimize. Even the tiniest things can influence your store visibility and search rankings. So while you concentrate on the metadata, keywords, and page content you forget what makes your pages appear in search in the first place — XML sitemap.

We're happy to announce the release of the new Magento 2 XML Sitemap extension as an addition to the famous SEO module. It allows you to generate an accurate XML sitemaps automatically, define indexing frequency and priority and exclude pages from a sitemap. 

With this module, you can improve website indexing and make relevant pages appear in search results faster!

Magento 2 Auto Related Products

New features of the Magento 2 Auto Related Products

An XML sitemap is an important aspect of technical SEO that serves as a roadmap for search robots. Having an XML sitemap ensures search robots don't miss any important pages of your store and can index the newest of them faster. 

Generally, it is a file with all links to your website: products, categories, CMS, and blog pages. However, usually, you don't have to display all of the pages in the search, correspondingly not all of them have to be crawled and indexed. 

While you can add the directives for search robots in the robots.txt file, it is easier just to exclude pages from the XML sitemap in Magento 2.

So, in this article, you will learn how to do this from the admin panel, with no technical configurations required. All you need is the Magento 2 XML Sitemap Extension.

To exclude pages from Magento XML sitemap: 

1. Choose what pages you want to remove from XML sitemap. 

If you decided to remove Magento 2 XML Sitemap Extension, please follow the steps below. You can contact our team for a free consultation in case you have any issues with Magefan's extension.

Remove Extension Files

Removing files instruction depends on the way the XML Sitemap extension has been installed in.

1. If you can find the extension files in the folder

app/code/Magefan/XmlSitemap

then remove this folder.

2. If the extension was installed via the composer and its files located in the folder

vendor/magefan/module-xml-sitemap

then run composer CLI command to remove it

composer remove magefan/module-xml-sitemap

Once extension files have been removed, run these Magento CLI commands:

php bin/magento setup:upgrade
php bin/magento setup:di:compile
php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy

Remove Extension Data (optional)

Attention! This will clean all XML

If you need to update Magento 2 XML Sitemap Extension by Magefan, please follow the steps below.

Update using composer

If the XML Sitemap module was installed via the composer (check if vendor/magefan/module-xml-sitemap folder exists), then you need to run these simple CLI commands in Magento 2 directory:

composer remove magefan/module-xml-sitemap
composer require magefan/module-xml-sitemap ^x.x.x
# replace x.x.x with the version you want to use
php bin/magento setup:upgrade
php bin/magento setup:di:compile
php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy

Update using archive and FTP

If the XML Sitemap module was installed via FTP (check if app/code/Magefan/XmlSitemap folder exists), then follow these commands:

1. Download the latest version of the XML Sitemap extension

You can install Magento 2 XML Sitemap Extension by Magefan, using composer or archive installation methods.

Installation via composer (recommended)

1. Open command line.
2. Using command "cd" navigate to your Magento 2 root directory.
3. Run CLI commands:

composer require magefan/module-xml-sitemap ^x.x.x
# replace x.x.x with the version you want to install # Authentication required (repo.magento.com)
# Get your Magento Marketplace authentication keys or use these: 
# Username: 7c018006799466c681ad507e27904677
# Password: 289077c86e811661a8f7751828485d3a
php bin/magento setup:upgrade
php bin/magento setup:di:compile
php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy

Related products, cross-sells, up-sells, and best sellers definitely drive customers' attention to your products and help you increase sales. Still, they attract customers to products that are already popular and sell well. 

Correspondingly, it raises the question of how to put new products out there and expose them to a wider audience.

So, today, we'll provide an answer to that and discuss the best way to attract customer's attention to the newest products or Magento New Arrivals. 

We'll show you how to add them automatically for multiple pages and change New Arrivals dynamically with Magento 2 Auto Related Products Extension. 

With no further ado, let's try to add the New Arrival product in Magento 2.

You need to set up the related product rule that will display new products on multiple pages of your store at once. For that go to Marketing > Automatic Related Products > Rules and press the Add New Rule button.

1. Configure General Rule Information

The first thing you have

Magento Two-factor Authentication is one of many ways to improve Magento admin security and prevent unauthorized access to your data. Correspondingly all admin users have to complete the authorization process to verify their identity before logging in.

Two-Factor authentication is available in the latest Magento 2.4 version by default and supports multiple authenticators like Google Authenticator, Suo, Authy, and U2F keys. So it is easy for you to configure it and generate access codes for different users to add an additional layer of security.  

However, if your website is in the development stage or if you work on the testing environment you might need to disable two factor authentication in Magento.

To disable 2F Authentication in Magento 2 you just need to run the following command:

php bin/magento module:disable Magento_TwoFactorAuth

If you want to grant some developers access to your installation

Magento 2 bestsellers are products with a top-selling record that generate maximum revenue in your store. The best-seller level is based on the products, orders, and tax statistics that Magento generates for you. 

Bestsellers increase customers' confidence level and give a sense of quality and guarantee since these products are already trusted by others. 

So, doesn't it makes sense to generate even more revenue from products that already sell well?

Displaying best-selling products in Magento 2 also helps you to improve customers' experience. Popular products are being displayed in plain view which saves customers time and encourages them to make purchasing decisions faster.

Though you can display best-seller products in Magento by default, it requires you to manually set up a widget for each page where you want to display these products. 

In this article, we'll show you how to automate the process with the Auto-Related Products Extension for Magento 2 and display bestsellers on multiple

The deadlock issue is one of the biggest and most difficult issues to fix on Magento 2, which every Magento developer comes across sooner or later. Once you start to search for how to fix deadlock issues in Magento, you will have a hard time finding an ultimate guide.

So, my guess is —  it is probably not the first article you come across. But hopefully, you'll find the answer here.

In this article, you'll learn everything you need to know to understand and fix deadlock issues. Or at least significantly reduce them.

Why Do Magento Indexes Get Invalidated?

When you face the Magento deadlock issue, the first thing is to check Magento indexes and learn why they get invalidated. For that go to System > Tools > Index Management, make sure that you have set up index mode correctly and that your crons are running.

Magento index modes

Magento has two index modes:

• Update on Save — reindex is done during product save (it is not recommended to enable this mode on production since it can significantly

With the extensive custom database, you always have to go to extra mile to improve Magento admin security. Two-factor authentication is one of those tiny security steps you have to take to avoid any security loopholes and data leaks. 

Correspondingly it is an additional layer of security beyond credentials and reCAPTCHA every user attempting to log in goes through.

Though it is not recommended to disable 2FA in Magento, there are some exceptions. You can disable it if the store is in the development or testing stage. 

Still, you don't have to disable two-factor authentication completely, you can do this for a specific user. And we know how.

To disable Two-factor authentication in Magento for a specific user:

1. Create a etc/di.xml file in your custom module:

<?xml version="1.0" ?> 
<config xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="urn:magento:framework:ObjectManager/etc/config.xsd"> 
<type name="Magento\TwoFactorAuth\Model\TfaSession"> 
<plugin