Magento 2: Extension Warning

If you don’t know, “MailChimp is a simple email marketing software (EMS) which gives you a number of easy options for designing, sending and saving templates of your emails.” We normally recommend this software to some of our smaller Magento merchants for email marketing and newsletter subscriber gathering. The MageMonkey extension by eBizmarts always worked well until we tried the Magento 2 extension.

Our developers have run into the following problems. Many of these errors are basic and make us question the proficiency of the Magento 2 team that wrote the extension.

1) Installing the ebizmarts extension breaks the Magento compiler

Anytime you compile after having installed it, you receive a big red error output while it compiles. This poses a big problem because compiling is a regularly executed Magento 2 process.

2) You cannot accept email subscribers unless you have Mandrill credentials plugged in

This has frustrated our MailChimp merchants that don’t want to set up a Mandrill account for transactional emails. Some of them only want to gather subscribers. This isn’t a limitation of MailChimp, however. Rather, it’s a limitation in the extension’s logic.

3) The logging isn’t working

We can see that the extension attempts to write to a log file called var/log/MageMonkey.log. However, when we turn on the logging feature, that file never shows up.

4) Magento newsletter subscribers are not being fed to MailChimp at all

We did a little debugging on our own for this and found that the extension tries to send subscribers in this plugin file Model/Plugin/Subscriber.php. The problem is that plugin is declared incorrectly in the di.xml file. Our developers tested this by placing a test log statement in that file and it never executes.

5) The extension adds a layout XML file (view/frontend/layout/customer_account.xml) that adds a new tab to the customer Dashboard called My Saved Credit Cards (screenshot attached)

This is an issue of security. We have been unable to think of why MailChimp would need to save credit cards.

Several of our developers within Razoyo have been reaching out to Ebizmarts through a couple different email addresses and have received no response or acknowledgement from the company. We have always been fans of MailChimp and Ebizmarts. Their Magento 1 extensions are top notch, but due to the many errors and security threat that the MageMonkey extension has we are more comfortable recommending Bronto at this time and offering special pricing for clients to use our agency account.

Have any other developers had this issue? If so, what solution do you recommend? What is your opinion on the save credit card feature?