Welcome to the Magento Junction. No Content Management System is perfect in itself. The same verbiage applies to Magento as well. It needs few plugins not only for basic tasks like Content Editor but also for helping you to amplify the shopping experience of a visitor. In this write up, we’ll list the must have and helping extensions for your e-Commerce Website running on Magento.

Fontis WYSIWYG Editor

Magento does not come with a default WYSIWYG Editor, but it allows you adding the best editors available such as TinyMCE, FCKEditor, and CKedtior. You can download the text editor by visiting their Websites; however, you’ve to do manual scripting to add them in your Website’s Dashboard. We suggest you not to waste your precious time in coding and make use of Fontis WYSIWYG Editor. This plugin allows you adding the TinyMCE Editor, FCKEditor, and CKeditor quickly.

Fontis WYSIWYG Editor (Courtesy: Magento Connect)

Admin TinyMCE

You can install this extension to add the TinyMCE Editor in the Administrator Panel. The best part is that this extension is available free of cost.

Screenshot of TinyMCE Editor (Courtesy: Magento Connect)

Blog Extension

The blog is one of the best ways to reach your customers quickly. You can install this extension to setup a static blog in your Magento-powered Website. Publish the articles on daily or weekly basis and get attention of search engines to pour in traffic at your site. Following are the features of this blog extension: -

1. WYSIWYG Editor
2. Excerpt Field
3. Tag Clouds
4. Switchable Menu Categories

Magento Blog Extension (Courtesy: Magento Connect)

Enhanced Admin Product Grid

This extension gives you complete control on the Product Grid and its management. Enhanced Admin Product Grid allows you to search for products just like a customer, to highlight the row using CTRL button, and to refresh multiple selected product along with other functionalities.

Screenshot of Enhanced Product Grid (Courtesy: Magento Connect)

Magento Easy Lightbox

You can install this extension to install the Lighbtbox Widget in your Website running on Magento. It’s a breeze to download and install this extension.

Magento Easy Lightbox Screenshot (Courtesy: Magento Connect)

Shop by manufacturer/brand/character/etc - Attribute Info Pages

This extension allows you to define the additional information of attributes defined in product catalog. You can use this extension to display the pages with HTML description, logo, external link, and product listing for the specified attributes. In simple words, you can create pages to shop by brands, manufacturers, supplier, artist, color, character, and other attributes.

A Sample Page created using Shop by Manufacturer Extension (Courtesy: Magento Connect)

PAYONE Extension

Each ecommerce Website needs a solution to accept the payments from their buyers. You can install free PAYONE Extension to create a payment gateway for your Website. It has inbuilt automatic address checking, address correction, and credit scoring modules. It does not require your buyers to fill any registration form. The gateway created using this extension accepts payment from Credit Cards, Debit Cards, Direct Debit Cards, International Cash in Advance (CiA), International Invoice, Cash on Delivery, and PayPal. The options to receive payments from EPS and Yellowpay are available on request. PAYONE Extension also has support for risk management services like Velocity Monitoring, AddressCheck for 20 countries, 3DSecure, POS- and Merchant-blacklists, BIN Check & IP Check, BankAccount- and CreditCardChecks. All the payments are transferred directly through AJAX call from customer’s browser to FinanceGate Platform, therefore, you don’t need any PCI DSS Certification.

Custom PDF Invoice Layout

The Magento’s default PDF Invoice Layout is limited and does not have enough documentation on how to customize it. A customer visits your Website, buys a product and gets the Invoice. He/she has to keep the Invoice for long at least until the warranty of product expires. Most of the times the invoice does not have some essential pieces of information like logo of your store, contact details, and others. You can install Custom PDF Invoice Layout to customize the invoice layout. This extension allows the addition of large logo image along with custom text in both header and footer.

Custom PDF Invoice Layout Extension (Courtesy: Magento Junction)

ASPerience DeleteOrders

This extension allows you deletion of comments, selected sales orders, credit memos, and shipments. However, you should carefully delete anything as the deleted things cannot be retrieved. The extension manufacturer advises to delete only test orders that appears just after installing the Magento freshly on a Website. We suggest you to take print out and backups of sales/memos etc. before deleting them through this extension.

Sample of working with ASPerience DeleteOrders (Courtesy: Magento Connect)

J2T Auto Add to Cart

This Magento Extension allows the auto addition of products in the cart as per pre-defined rules like a coupon code from a consumer.

J2T Auto Add to Card Module (Courtesy: Magento Connect)

IW PayPal Standard Currencies

You can use this extension to add the PayPal supported currencies to PayPal Website Payments Standard Method in your Websites’ administrator panel and use them as your transaction currency.

IW PayPal Standard Currencies (Courtesy: Magento Connect)

MWD News and Testimonials with Images Extension

You can install this extension to add content pages to your Website like Testimonials, News, Press Articles, and Press Releases. You can also use MWD News & Testimonials with Images Extension along with Blogs Extension discussed above. This extension also allows you adding the image, thumbnail and PDF file with content.

MWD News & Testimonials with Image Extension (Courtesy: Magento Connect)

FreeQuickContact

This extension allows you managing the contact fields and emails of the customers. The visitors can use its form to provide you the feedback and contact with you in case of any queries/complaints.

Screenshot of Contact Us Form Generated with FreeQuickContact Extension (Courtesy: Magento Connect)

Conclusion

You can use above extensions in your ecommerce gallery for an effective control and facilitate your visitors. We request you to provide your valuable feedback through comments.