Disable Magento Frontend via htaccess

Some days ago one of our customers approached us with the goal to disable the Magento store frontend for the public and only use the Magento backend for internal use.
Of course this prevents customers from purchasing your products, but in addition also minimizes possible attack vectors for the Magento software.

With the following snippet in the Apache .htaccess file, the frontend will no longer be accessible and return a custom 404 page:

ErrorDocument 404 /closed.html

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(index.php/)?(admin/)?backend(.*) [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !passthrough=secret;? [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [L,R=404]

In this snippet you have to replace the string “backend” with your Magento admin url and optionally the “secret” with a more complex password.
Afterwards you only have to create the closed.html maintenance page.

As a result the Magento store frontend is no longer available and the maintenance page is shown. If you still need to access the frontend – e.g. to lookup certain values or something like that – you can manually create a cookie with name “passthrough” and value “secret” and the protected frontend will be shown.

For nginx or Caddy webservers the procedure is very similar.

Disable Magento Frontend via htaccess
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How Browsers Restrict Cookies in 2020

A lot of things are changing in the online world these days at a very fast pace. Especially the trend regarding privacy concerns that has widely been started with the GDPR in Europe, now makes its way to the rest of the world. As a result more and more browser vendors are starting to put privacy at their top priority. This results in a lot of changes on how browsers restrict cookies which we will have a deeper look at.

How Browsers Restrict Cookies in 2020
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Generate Images From HTML With AWS Lambda

A common requirement is to generate images from HTML or CSS code e.g. for barcodes or embedding contents into emails. Running this job on a dedicated server environment often results in over-provisioning the ressources that’s why AWS Lambda is the perfect solution for that task.

AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service which means you do not need to take care of provisioning your hardware, updating the software and upgrading CPU ressources because Amazon does all that for you – without you even noticing that. Therefore it is an awesome use-case for “on-off” workloads. In this blog post we will walk through the different steps that are necessary to run the wkhtmltoimage tool on AWS Lambda to generate images from HTML.

Generate Images From HTML With AWS Lambda
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WordPress Cache Busting – or what to do if my design changes do not appear?

As the owner of a WordPress website or blog you may know the situation: you artificially made some design changes in the admin area and as soon as you preview the page the changes are simply not there – no matter how hard you try. That’s when a technique called Cache Busting is required.

Cache is in the Way

One of the many reasons for this behaviour may be the browser’s caching mechanisms. Basically it makes a lot of sense for the browser to not reload all the Stylesheets and JavaScript files each and every time that a user visits your page because the frequency with that these files change in general is very low. That’s why a lot of websites instruct the browser to cache static files like CSS and JavaScript for e.g. 1 year. Therewith lots of bandwidth and downloading power on the browser side and requests on the server side is saved and the website can be rendered dramatically faster.
A good in-depth explanation of various browser caching mechanisms can also be found here.

WordPress Cache Busting – or what to do if my design changes do not appear?
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How to Optimize Recolize Recommendations?

One of the central questions of our new customers is, how to optimize Recolize Recommendations in their daily business, to get a better performance? As Recolize offers a totally different approach compared to competitors to integrate recommendation widgets into a page, the analysis of the recommendations also differs from fixed positioned widgets.

How to Optimize Recolize Recommendations?
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How to Correctly Evaluate Magento Extensions?

The Magento Marketplace consists of thousands of individual extensions from lots of different vendors for all kinds of use cases. This blog post discusses the topic of how to correctly evaluate Magento Extensions regarding their quality.

Each of these steps is meant to be executed sequentially and the extension should not be used if one of the steps cannot be finished successfully.

How to Correctly Evaluate Magento Extensions?
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7 Reasons to Adapt Your Personalization Rules

In our post “Adaption of Personalization Rules – Pros and Cons” we‘ve mentioned the general pros and cons of adapting personalization rules. Our general recommendation is to let your personalization solution like Recolize do its job and use the personalized algorithms to suggest your products. But we totally understand, that there are occasions when an adaption is absolutely reasonable and needed. Here are 7 reasons to adapt your personalization rules.

7 Reasons to Adapt Your Personalization Rules
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5 Types of Transactional Emails With Recommendations

In our last blog post we‘ve described 5 advantages of recommendations in transactional emails. In this one we give you 5 concrete examples of types of transactional emails where recommendations make sense.

5 Types of Transactional Emails With Recommendations
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5 Advantages of Recommendations in Transactional Emails

Offering personalized recommendations in emails can be a great way to guide your customers back to your website. Many online shops are using this method to attract their customers after a purchase. And also at other contact points.

Find out 5 advantages of offering personalized recommendations in transactional emails.

5 Advantages of Recommendations in Transactional Emails
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