Magento is an open source e-commerce platform platform. We developed an open source extension for Magento access control to complement our web-to-print extension that allows you to incorporate your web-to-print and dynamic imaging templates in your Magento store.

The access control extension comes in handy when you want to hide certain products (templates) from the general public or give access to certain products only to certain customers. For example, if you are running a print store for corporate customers and they all have their access limited to their own branded products and categories.

Installation

Your Magento website can install the extension automatically if you provide the right key.

Open Magento Connect Manager (System/Configuration/Magento Connect Manager), paste the extension key and hit Install.

We recommend installing the latest stable release. Beta versions may have unresolved issues or experimental features.

Group creation

Access control is managed per user group. The extension comes with several pre-defined groups for registered and unregistered users. You need to create user groups to assign individual users to them.

There are 3 pre-defined access groups in the extension:

• NONE – Category products are not visible to any customer
• ALL – Category products are visible to all customers
• REGISTERED – Category products are visible only to registered customers

To create additional user groups, go to Customers/Customer groups page in Magento admin and click on Add New Customer Group button in the top right corner.

Input the Group Name, chose the Tax class from the drop-down menu and click Save Customer Group.

Assigning users to groups

You can assign users to groups individually.

Check the box next to the customer name(s), select Assign a customer group from the Actions drop-down menu and the group from the Group drop-down menu and click Submit.

The customer(s) is now added to the access group and has access to products that are in a category that has the access group assigned to it.

Configuring individual categories

Select the category and assign an access group (hold Ctrl to select multiple groups) in the Show to customer groups section of the General Information tab and click on Save Category.

Any user belonging to any of the access group(s) you selected will be able to see and order the products from that category.

Products in multiple categories

Some products may belong to multiple categories. Access if any of the categories is available to the user.

For example, one of product’s categories is available to general public, so anyone can see the product regardless of the other categories.

Default configuration

There is one store-wide default configuration. It can be configured in Custom Groups Access Control section on System/Configuration/Catalog page in Magento admin. Changes to the default settings affect all categories with USE DEFAULT setting selected. It is also the initial access control setting for new categories.