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 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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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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Recolize Emerges on the Australian Market through a Partnership with Magenable

With our new partner Magenable we want to capture the Australian market and provide our novel Recolize Recommendation Engine to all Australian online shops and websites.

The partnership enables us to easily integrate our Recommendation Engine for customers at the other end of the world. Magenable helps us to provide one of our main goals in Down Under: an easy, perfect and fast integration within minutes.

Recolize Emerges on the Australian Market through a Partnership with Magenable
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