PHPro modules for Magento

Magento 2 is out-of-the-box a great platform with many features. Over the years, we at PHPro have gained a lot of experience with this platform, from Magento 1 to Magento 2 and beyond. We know better than anyone how to seamlessly integrate this platform into your business and processes and add value online for your users and end customers. Both in B2B and B2C.

By gaining the trust of our customers and bringing many projects to a successful conclusion, we have also noticed that the platform could use some extra features to make it smoother and even better implemented. We do this by developing certain features and improvements in a modular way. But what exactly does that mean? And what added value does such a module offer?

Each module is an enhancement to the original platform. It is a piece of code that gets integrated into the many modules that make up Magento, and it ensures that a new feature is added or an existing feature is improved. These are not always “visible” features that you as a customer or employee can see or experience. They are also small things that speed up or simplify the developers' work, allowing them to devote more time to quality work.

These modules arise from the questions (and sometimes annoyances) that arise from developers and experts like us. We think they are necessary features that we miss in Magento 2, and sometimes find in other platforms. They are not things that you as a customer dwell on. By building them modularly, we can easily reuse them in other projects.

As mentioned above, they facilitate or improve a particle of Magento. And these are general improvements that can pretty much apply to any implementation. For example, they make security a little more stringent, or store more feedback from the platform itself in the background.

Our PHPro modules each address a specific part of the code and add an extension or an innovation. The benefit depends from module to module and, as already discussed, is not always visible. So as a client, why do you want them?

We're not going to reinvent the wheel twice. If we see that there is something that could be better about the platform itself then we make a module for that. And our customers benefit because we as developers don't have to spend any more time on it: we've already improved it. We can easily implement the modules because we know they work. So we focus on the project and the customer's needs.

It is also an assurance for our customers that their Magento implementation works as optimally as possible. From our expertise, we add or improve components. And every time we further refine these components, they are transferred to our customers' setup. This way, we guarantee a high-quality platform and we monitor its performance.

A great example of a PHPro Module is our extension to the Admin Security Module. Here we added an extra layer of security and stopped brute forcing, but in a different way. Because of this, accounts are not immediately locked if you accidentally enter a wrong password 3 times - can happen.

What we are doing differently now is temporarily locking the account. After a short period of time you can try to log in again. If it fails again, this period is extended and reactivated. And this keeps repeating until the user can log in successfully or until an administrator takes action. You see, the system remains just as secure, but more pleasant for the user who happens to forget his password for a moment.

Another example: our API logger. It's not always easy to figure out what goes wrong when communicating between APIs and the Magento 2 platform. It's frustrating - and sometimes time-consuming - to figure out errors. To that end, we've built a small, custom module to integrate into any project. It helps us easily identify where errors or irregularities occur between the different sytems and the Magento API. This allows us to intervene and make adjustments faster and more precisely. Good for the developer? Absolutely. And for the customer? Also. Because we can work faster and put more time into our code.

That's right! This is also the strength of Magento, and we too use modules from other vendors (third-party modules) for our customers.
But not a module exists for everything. Sometimes a module from a vendor is too expensive. Or the code quality is insufficient and this has a negative impact on the performance of the webshop, ...

PHPro itself does not place paid modules on the marketplace, the modules we develop are available to our clients.

Our architecture team, our developers and experts also draw a lot of inspiration from the community. To learn, to discover, to write better and better code. So we also want to give something back to the community.

We decided to make some modules open-source so that the community can work with them: suggest improvements and add features. Through GitHub and Packagist, among others, we offer our code so that other developers can suggest enhancements. PHPro monitors the quality of the pull requests and ensures that the modules keep evolving in the right way.

An overview of our open source modules can be found on our GitHub.

In short, our PHPro Modules are small pieces of code that make Magento 2 as a whole just that little bit better for user and developer. They are not custom modules - like integrating an ERP or a marketing automation platform - but they do help our customers get more out of their platform and budget.