During the week someone asked me if I knew whether a given store was running on Magento. I thought it might be worth documenting my own little set of clues that help me spot a Magento store running in the wild. I’d be interested to hear of other people’s tips, especially if I am missing a really obvious one!
The Cart Page URL
Barring some sort major modification most ecommerce stores will have a cart page, and most will have the default Magento one. So you can identify a Magento store by just looking at the URL of the cart page. If it’s something like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/checkout/cart/
or if they have not got the url rewrites running it might look like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php/checkout/cart/
The Page Source
This requires you to check the actual page source (Right-click on the web site and select View Source). Once you can see the page source, there are a few dead giveaways that a store is running Magento. Look for the
elements and check the src attribute. They will be something like this is a store is running Magento:
The thing to look for is the /skin/frontend/ part of the URL.
Interestingly this will also give you clues as to how they have customized Magento. If they have /default/default in the src URL, then they have possibly just edited the default Magento template files, they’re in for some fun when they try to upgrade!
The Cookies
Some of the clues I have outlined so far could be lost in a big customization of Magento so that you cannot use them to identify a Magento store, but this next one, the cookies, will almost always get results. This is true because a) the stores need cookies to function and b) because changing the name of the cookies would not be a useful customization.
For this one I suggest the very very awesome Firefox extension called Firebug. I’m just going to go ahead and assume if you’re reading a web development blog, you’re running Firefox, you are right?
It is possible to see the cookies for a store by just looking at the cookies in your Firefox cookie viewer too, but Firebug is easier.
When you are browsing around the site, open Firebug and the ‘Net’ tab and expand the GET www.yourdomain.com element to reveal the Headers. You’re looking for either a response Header like this:
Set-Cookie frontend=7f84f718e5bf3d025ac3b6aee1e479a5;
or a request header like this:
Cookie frontend=7f84f718e5bf3d025ac3b6aee1e479a5;
Also related to cookies, often visiting this enable-cookies CMS page will show you the standard ‘You need cookies enabled’ page – which is a dead giveaway too:
http://www.yourdomain.com/enable-cookies
It looks like this:
Enable your Cookies!
The Admin URL
Most stores don’t bother changing the admin URL – which is fair enough – but it gives you the biggest possible clue. If you visit yourdomain.com/admin you are presented with the Magento admin login page, the Magento page title and maybe even a Magento logo.
The Standard Magento Login Window, complete with trademark and copyright.
Some people may customize the login page, but they often forget the page title
Speed
If the store takes longer than 5 seconds to respond to a request, then it’s probably running Mageno – just kidding we love you Magento!
So that’s my list of Magento clues, I’d say you can be fairly sure if 1 or 2 of these are true that a store is running Magento, if you got through the whole list and none of them were true, it probably isn’t a Magento store, but it still could be.
So if you have any easier ways to identify a Magento store, or know of any Magento stores that would beat my test, let me know.
Originally published on magebase.com. Copyright © 2010 Magebase - All Rights Reserved.
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Awesome
The first sign of Magento I recognize is usually the product page and Magento’s default image slider. Other than that, there are some awesome ideas in this article!
Interesting article.
I have two more clues:
The /admin URL can be changed by setup. So many people try to obscure the admin-path. But if you look at http://www.yourdomain.com/downloader you will mostly see the page for the Magento Connect-Manager and then you will see the correct link back to admin.
There is also an add-on for firefox called Wappalyzer, which tries to detect a magento-store. It also detects wordpress, drupal, jquery and so on.
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/10229/
I think the biggest sign that it is magento is the use of prototype (most time + jquery). That long js is a big fat sign.
The best one I feel is .. getting the image source.. in magento, images are under media folder.
Hi,
One more clue:
You will find below code in view source for magento store…
//
Thanks!
Nikul
continue in above post…
var BLANK_URL = ‘http://www.lanigiro.com.sg/js/blank.html’;
var BLANK_IMG = ‘http://www.lanigiro.com.sg/js/spacer.gif’;
Hi MageBase guy,
Please remove my last comment due to code formatting issues.
I just wrote a Magento plugin for WhatWeb which is the best software to identify web technologies.
You can see the rules I used to identify Magneto here: http://github.com/urbanadventurer/WhatWeb/blob/master/plugins/magento.rb
Hi Andrew,
thanks for posting a link to your plugin. I had a quick glance at the rules you have included. I would be very surprised if rules 1,2 and 4 were triggered – meaning that someone is running with the default settings and theme. Boxes.css has been renamed to styles.css on newer versions. And one more general problem with checking for text is that Magento has been translated into lots of different languages so your rule set matches mostly on stores in English.
Great work on the tool – very handy.
Hi what platform are they using?
http://www.business.govt.nz/
The CMS platform they are using is very good.
Hi Nathan,
The website, http://www.business.govt.nz is using the Plone platform. Plone is written in Python and is popular with governments partly because of it’s excellent reputation for security.
I know it’s running Plone because I viewed the source code of the website and the HTML meta tag specified the page generator as Plone. WhatWeb also reports the website as using Plone.
HI andrew:
Awesome this is very useful info.. I’m planning to use it instead of joomla.. it’s really really good & fast, speed is the key..
many thanks
nathan
I have built and am currently running ~13 magento stores. its pretty easy to tell.. I just show source and look for the theme url, and look where the image urls are pointing. similar to wordpress where everything is /WP-********..
I use a nice little plugin for firefox called wappallizer and it shows all the technology that is used in a website unobtrusively in the address bar eg: http://magebase.com/ apache analytics jquery and wordpress pretty handy some times
You can also navigate to http://www.example.com/install.php and see the message:
FAILED ERROR: Magento is already installed.
Of course not true on all sites, but it works sometimes.