Plugins

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Danyon Murray

Over the past year or so at Bozmur, I’ve been asked to find or create a couple plug-ins for Magento. Here are a few of the plug-ins I’ve found useful or built myself.

Order Scanning
This is an add-on to the admin interface that would allow someone to complete an order by scanning the package before it shipped. When the order is place we only do an authorization transaction on the credit card. Scanning the package captures the credit card transaction and marks the order complete.

Bozmur Enhanced Order Grid
This plug-in shows products ordered on the orders grid. It also lets you sort by products ordered.

Bozmur Authorize.NET CIM Interface
This plug-in allows you to interface with Authorize.net’s customer information management system so that you or a customer can reuse credit cards. This system allows you to store credit card information on the Authorize.net site and not on your local database.

Aschroder Set Custom Order Number
This is a nice free plug-in that allows you to set a custom number for 4 different Magento entities; order, invoice, shipment and credit memo.

Admin Custom Shipping Rate
Adds ability to specify a custom shipping rate and title when creating a new order in backend. This allows you to utilize any shipping method and price you want, even if it’s not available to customers on the front end.

Enhanced Admin Product Grid
Adds some useful, customizable features to the admin product management grid including new columns and tools. Very useful!

Unirgy_Giftcert
I like this plug-in. I was a little thrown off at first with the way the coupon worked. It works like a coupon code. I was expecting it to work more like a credit card. Once I got over my preconceptions I loved it.

MaxMind Fraud Alert
One of my clients used this plug-in and it seemed to work alright, but it seemes to burn through the credits kinda fast.

The following have minimal functionality, or they are still in the works.

QuickBooks Integration
Read about this plug-in here.

Omniture Integration
Somewhat functional, but mostly still in the works.

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Magento Quickbooks Plugin

Posted on January 30, 2011 by Danyon Murray

I’ve had a couple of clients over the past year ask for a fast and easy way to integrate their Magento and QuickBooks. Some of them were looking to use QuickBooks as a POS solution, and some were just looking to easily import their transactions. I started looking in the normal places for an existing plugin, but wasn’t able to find anything that plugged straight into Magento. Blueacorn has a good article on some of the options available. The article is a bit outdated, but there are some recent posts in the comments that were helpful. None of these solutions addressed my biggest concern, though. I couldn’t finding anything that plugs right into Magento. The solutions I found required additional software that did a bunch of other stuff as well. They wern’t really what I was looking for.  So, I decided to do what any good programmer would do and started writing my own plugin.

Now, I know virtually nothing about QuickBooks.  I know it’s business accounting software made by Intuit. I know there are like 10ish different versions.  I know it can be used as a POS solution, and I know it can be used for tracking customers, products, inventory and, of course, transactions. Do I know how to do or set any of this up in QuickBooks? Absolutely not. I do, however, kinda know how to look through information once it’s in QuickBooks. I also know that there are a couple of way to import information into QuickBooks. There are .qif, .qfx, .ofx, .xls, .csv and .qbo files that can be created and imported. After digging a bit more I found a couple articles about qbXML. That sounded a bit more my style. I’m comfortable with XML.

So I started researching qbXML and PHP and that lead me to this article. A company by the name of ConsoliBYTE has put together a PHP framework for QuickBooks. I also found a couple articles about the QuickBooks Web Connector software. It’s a software application that runs on Microsoft Windows that enables applications to exchange data with QuickBooks products. It’s still an additional piece of software, but at least it’s a bit more focused on the task at hand.

I’d love to be able to wrap this up by saying that with these tools I’ve been able to put together a full-fledged Magento solution, but not so much. I have been able to queue up new Magento transactions for submission into QuickBooks. I’ve also been working on an interface in the admin section that allows you to queue old transactions for submission to QuickBooks. So, I still have a ways to go, but I’m off to a good start.

Posted in Magento, Plugins, QuickBooks | Tagged , , | 1 Comment