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 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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How To Integrate Recolize With Google Tag Manager?

One of the key features of Recolize is flexibility:

  • System independent: no matter if Magento 1, Magento 2, Drupal, TYPO3, WordPress, PrestaShop, Shopify or custom website. Visit also our integrations page for more information.
  • Content independent: no matter if products, blog articles, CMS pages or news.
  • Display everywhere: display as many widgets as you want to on every page you can think of. Easily configurable in the Recolize Tool.

For some systems we have standard plugins. But Recolize is also extremely easy integrable with Google Tag Manager.

  Of course you can use this integration guide also for a direct integration into your website or into other tag managers.

How To Integrate Recolize With Google Tag Manager?
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How to Build an Alexa Skill for your Online Shop with Recolize in 15 Minutes?

Building an Alexa Skill is very easy if you combine it with Recolize personalized product recommendations. In the following I will describe the required steps and during the course of this blog post we will develop a sample skill that you can use as a starting point for your individual skill. The sample skill is available on our Github account.

We will create a so-called Custom Alexa Skill that will be able to simply answer the question “Alexa, open Recolize and ask what can you recommend to me today?” or “Alexa, open Recolize and ask what is the recommendation for today?“.
Therefore we need the Skill definition and additionally a AWS Lambda function that will trigger our Recolize recommendation API. The beauty of AWS Lambda is that you do not need to provision any servers but the so-called serverless framework will only be active if someone asks Alexa to trigger your skill. For more information on AWS Lambda functions see the official documentation.

We use the official Ask CLI commands to easily deploy both the skill itself as well as the Lambda function that will call the Recolize API.

How to Build an Alexa Skill for your Online Shop with Recolize in 15 Minutes?
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HALLHUBER wins 2. Place at the Shop Usability Award

Our customer HALLHUBER relaunched its online shop in February and moved from Magento 1 to Magento 2. With this switch a beautiful new design and usability concept was implemented.

Directly after the relaunch HALLHUBER participated in the german Shop Usability Award and won the 2nd place. We are very proud to be part of this award-winning new shop and we’ve implemented a completely individual design for the online shop based on their amazing new concept. In the screenshots above and blow you can see the Recolize integration on the home and on a product page.

HALLHUBER wins 2. Place at the Shop Usability Award
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3 Ways to Integrate Cross-Sells on Product Pages

Lot’s of customers ask us how to integrate cross-sells into their product pages. Of course, the definition of cross-sells differs from customer to customer. Some are understanding manually selected fitting products to the currently selected one as cross-sells. Others want to automate. This article describes the automation: 3 ways to integrate automatic cross-sells into your online shop’s product pages.

3 Ways to Integrate Cross-Sells on Product Pages
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