Magento 2 Installation Guide
Installing the Hello Retail Business Magento 2 Extension
In this guide, you can read and learn about how to install the extension for Magento 2.
Our Magento 2 extension is developed for Magento 2.2 and higher but should be compatible with 2.0 and 2.1 as long as PHP 7 is used in your environment.
Our category feed is dependent on API features released in Magento 2.2 which means it will not work in 2.0 or 2.1.
Purchase extension in Magento Marketplace
- Go to marketplace.magento.com and login to your Magento account.
- Locate the search bar at the top of the page and type in "hello retail" in order to find the extension.
- Click on the Add to Cart button and proceed to checkout - once the purchase is complete then you can leave this site.
Installation via composer:
- The Hello Retail extension is in the Magento repository at marketplace.magento.com. To access this, you need to make sure that this repository is in your Magento's composer.json file (It should be there as a default).
- You may also want to add your Magento Marketplace private and public key to your magento's auth.json file if you haven't done so already.
And be sure that these credentials match the ones for the account used to purchase the free extension in marketplace in the first steps of this guide.
- When this is done, you should be able to install with the following commands:
composer require addwish/awext php bin/magento module:enable Addwish_Awext php bin/magento setup:upgrade php bin/magento setup:di:compile
Install with Extension Manager (deprecated)
- On the dashboard view, navigate to the left-hand side menu. Navigate to System and then click on Web Setup Wizard.
- Enter the Extension Manager - Make sure that you are connected to the Magento Marketplace Account that you used to purchase the Hello Retail extension from the first step of this guide.
- Click on the Review and Install button under the heading called Extensions Ready to Install.
- You should be able to locate the extension from the list. When you have located it, then click on Install in the Action column.
- We encourage that you check with your developer on whether or not to do a backup.
- Click on the Install button - As a default, your shop will go in maintenance mode while installing the extension. For this, we recommend that you do this when there is little traffic on your site.
- If everything went smoothly, you should get a success notification. If errors occur, please forward them to Support at support@helloretail.com and possibly also have your developer look at them.
- As the final step, you should navigate to the module configuration page and set it up properly - see the bottom of this guide.
Installation via manual upload
If you are comfortable with FTP and have shell access, you can download and install our extension manually.
- Click here: to download version 1.1.60
- Navigate to <magento_main_dir>/app/code/ .
If the code folder is not present, then you can create it and name the folder Addwish.
- Inside the Addwish folder, you create another folder called Awext so you end up with a folder structure like this:
<magento_main_dir>/app/code/Addwish/Awext
- Unpack the zip file and copy all the files inside the folder (not the folder itself, just the files inside) to the location we just created: <magento_main_dir>/app/code/Addwish/Awext
- Run these commands in your shell:
php bin/magento module:enable Addwish_Awext php bin/magento setup:upgrade php bin/magento setup:di:compile
3. As the final step you should navigate to the module configuration page and set it up properly - see bottom of this guide.
Updating Hello Retail extension - Magento 2
If you are using Hello Retail with your Magento 2 shop platform, chances are you have installed the Hello Retail Magento 2 extension that automates a lot of the setup and daily processes. As we encounter bugs or update Hello Retail's services, the extension will also be updated, and here we will show you how to perform an update.
The process of updating the extension depends on how you installed it in the first place. There are three ways you can have installed the extension: via Composer, Package Manager, or via a manual upload.
Updating with Composer
If you originally installed the Hello Retail extension through Composer, this is also where you should update it. You complete the update through a short series of command lines. Run each line after the other:
composer update addwish/awext php bin/magento setup:upgrade php bin/magento setup:di:compile php bin/magento cache:clean
Updating with Extension Manager (deprecated)
Navigate to Extension Manager and locate addwish/awext in the list of extensions.
After pressing Update, a wizard will guide you through the updating process, and the extension will be updated when you finish it.
Manual upload
The process of updating the extension is the same as with the original installation, but instead, you overwrite the existing files with the updated versions. You can find an extensive guide on manual installation here.
Configure the module settings:
Navigate to Stores -> Configuration and find the Hello Retail module configuration page.
This figure shows the interface for the General Settings option (see below)
Here you will be able to enable/disable the module as a whole but also manage individual feature settings.
Category Pages Content Feature:
For Category Pages Content, you can use either General Settings (see figure above) that can be set in the module configuration file. This option includes:
- Enabled Hello Retail Category Pages. This is the main "switch" that enables the Pages feature if Yes is selected in the dropdown menu, otherwise, Pages is unavailable no matter what the other settings are.
- Enabled backend rendering for Pages. Enabling/disabling the backend rendering mode of the Pages content. By default, the content is rendered on the frontend.
Backend rendering vs Frontend rendering is mainly a choice between page loading speed and page loading impression:- Backend rendering gives you a native loading impression, but if you want personalized content you need to disable the cache for these pages, which can hurt your loading speed. However, if you don't show personalized content but only want a category page ordered by general popularity, you can keep caching the pages and retain a fast loading speed.
- Frontend rendering does not give you the same native loading impression, yet is felt, instead, more like an addon, as the content is injected into the page after the initial page loading (much like the default way of implementing our product recommendations).
However, the positive part of this method is that you can get personalised content without disabling the cache for the rest of the page. So you can retain the general page speed and have snappy navigation.
- Enabled cache buster for category pages. This setting disables cache when the backend rendering mode is selected. In case the frontend rendering mode is selected, the setting is unavailable. Notice that caching shall be disabled on category pages if the content is supposed to be personalised, which affects your page loading speed.
- Default category setting. Setting the default behaviour of the Pages feature on your category pages. By default, the Pages content can either be enabled or disabled:
- setting it to Enabled makes it easy to apply Pages content to all categories (you can exclude it from the category-specific Pages settings);
- setting it to Disabled makes it easy to apply Pages content just to some specific categories (you can include specific categories in their category-specific Pages settings).
- Default Hello Retail Category Pages key. Setting a default Pages key to be used in all categories with no unique key specified. A common use case is to have one Pages configuration and have that key pasted there.
or Category Specific Settings:
There are also category-specific settings you can define in each category. These settings are contained within the settings tab, called "Hello Retail Category Pages Content". The option includes:
- Enable on this category. Enabling Pages content for this category with the options: Enabled, Disabled and Use default from configuration. Setting to Enabled enables the feature for that specific category, and disables it in case Disabled is set. Using the Use default from configuration, whatever is set in the general configuration is utilized. It makes it easier to manage many categories at once.
- Specific Hello Retail Pages Key. Setting a unique Pages key. You can use this to load content with a different Pages configuration than the one from the default. Leave the field empty to use the key from the General Setting mentioned above as the default configuration.
Configure your webshop in the Hello Retail Dashboard
After the installation setup of your platform and the onboarding flow, make sure to have your webshop configured. Read this guide here on how to do so: