If you run a Magento store and have to comply with GDPR regulations and/or value your customer's privacy, this post might be helpful for you. In this post, we will introduce some extensions that will help with GDPR compliance and give some tips on how following privacy laws can also be used to improve the user experience (UX) and performance of your Magento store. It truly can be a pain to follow each and every requirement that comes with privacy laws.

Ultimate Image Optimizer Extension for Magento 2 is the first extension that provides AVIF images support for Magento 2 stores.
Original images are converted to AVIF locally and automatically via Cron Job or command-line interface (CLI).
Besides AVIF images, the extension also creates WebP images and optionally also high-resolution/retina images automatically and allows to add lazy-load for the optimized images. The extension is 100% browser and full-page cache compatible. For browsers that do not support AVIF optimized images, WebP optimized images are used as fallback, for even older browsers, original images will be delivered to customers.

When we first heard about “Next-Generation Image Formats” we just thought “What? What is that about and why would we need this?”
The term “Next-Generation Image Formats” refers to newer image formats WebP, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR. These are newer image formats than JPG or PNG, the good old image formats we are all used to work with ever since.

With Magento Coding Standard and Code Sniffer rules update to v3 becoming effective July 11th, insecure functions like exec(), shell_exec(), system() etc. will be disallowed. That means any extension using one of these functions will be denied to be listed in Magento Marketplace. Since these functions can be a huge security issue, at least when used in a bad way, it is certainly a good decision by Magento to take this step towards improving Magento Security.
But what does this mean for Magento developers, what alternatives to these insecure functions are available to implement certain features that require system commands to be executed on server level?

It’s now a few weeks since we released our Magento 2 SEO Extension “JaJuMa PRG Pattern Link Masking” and since it was published we received some first valuable and interesting feedback. Based on this first feedback we had to notice:  Usage of PRG Pattern in SEO is still surprisingly unknown.

This insight came as a not small surprise to us, because actually PRG Pattern as SEO measure is not exactly a new recipe to tackle SEO issues related to Layered Navigations. ...

Layered navigation often referred to as Filter Navigation or faceted navigation, is used by almost every online store. Of course, it's a great feature that allows customers to quickly and easily browse through the products and restrict them to relevant products.

As helpful as the product filter and a layered navigation are for the customer, the challenge is to realize this function in a good and SEO-friendly way. ...