Utilities and Operations

Utilities and operations plugins support the store's operational health rather than customer-facing features. They cover environment setup and seeding, admin productivity, inventory management, content localisation, and outbound notifications via SMS and messaging apps.

Available plugins

Plugin	Description
AntiSpam	Protects the official contact form from bot and spam submissions with rate limiting, honeypot, disposable-email blocking, content scoring, geo/phone validation, and optional CAPTCHA/DNSBL integrations.
Seeder	Generates realistic dummy products, categories, customers, and orders for local and staging environments. Use this to populate a fresh install before front-end development begins.
Project Manager	Provides a structured workflow for tracking store configuration changes across environments. Helps teams coordinate deployments and document what changed between releases.
Command Palette	Adds a keyboard-shortcut command palette to the Craft admin (similar to VS Code's Ctrl+P). Admins can jump to any section, run common tasks, or search entries without navigating menus.
Warehouse Manager	Manages multi-location stock: assign products to warehouses, track per-location inventory levels, and configure fulfilment priority rules for order picking.
i18n Translator	Provides a UI for managing Craft static translation files directly from the admin. Translators can update string translations without touching the filesystem or deploying code.
Profi SMS	Sends transactional SMS notifications (order confirmation, shipping update, etc.) via the Profi SMS gateway, primarily used in the Czech and Slovak markets.
SMS Brana	Alternative SMS gateway integration for transactional notifications, covering CZ/SK. Configure sender name and event triggers in the plugin settings.
Telegram	Sends internal admin notifications to a Telegram bot/channel — useful for alerting the operations team about new orders, low stock, or failed payment events.
RMA	Return merchandise authorization workflow: a control panel request queue with configurable statuses/reasons/resolutions, a customer-facing "My Returns" area, file attachments, and dashboard metrics for the support team.
Backup	Exports store data (settings, catalog, customers, orders, and more) into a single downloadable compressed file, and restores from it — as a dry run or a real execute — with a full restore history log.
Vault	Provides the database schema (archive tables) for archiving historical yStore orders and quotes. As of v1.2.0 the tables exist but the archiving workflow itself (thresholds, schedule, manual trigger) is not yet implemented.

Notes on SMS and messaging plugins

Profi SMS, SMS Brana, and Telegram are outbound notification channels. They do not replace email notifications — they complement them for time-sensitive operational alerts or customer-facing delivery updates.

info

Configure which order events trigger a notification in each plugin's settings. Start with a single event (e.g. order placed) and expand once you have confirmed delivery.

Admin focus areas

• AntiSpam: requires the official Contact Form plugin to be installed; the free checks (rate limiting, honeypot, timing, disposable email, content scoring) cover most spam without a license — CAPTCHA/DNSBL integrations and notifications are licensed features.
• Seeder: run only in local or staging environments — it creates data that cannot be easily undone in bulk.
• Project Manager: agree on a team workflow before enabling; the plugin is most useful when all team members use it consistently.
• Command Palette: no configuration required after installation.
• Warehouse Manager: ensure warehouse locations are defined before assigning product stock; fulfilment priority rules affect which warehouse is picked first when an order is placed.
• i18n Translator: changes are written to translation files on disk — include them in version control.
• Profi SMS / SMS Brana: requires an active gateway account and sufficient SMS credit before enabling live notifications.
• Telegram: requires a Telegram bot token and the target chat or channel ID.
• RMA: review the seeded statuses/reasons/resolutions before going live and confirm they match your actual return process; requires yui/craft-plugin for order/customer lookups.
• Backup: requires yui/craft-plugin for the restore logic to actually write data (a restore without it can report success while changing nothing); treat downloaded backup files like a database dump — they contain raw, unencrypted store data.
• Vault: enabling it only creates the archive tables and activates the license — there is no configurable archiving behavior to roll out yet.

warning

Never run the Seeder in a production environment. It will create dummy data that is difficult to clean up without direct database access.

Typical rollout flow

1. Run Seeder in local/staging to populate test data.
2. Validate output and side effects of any utility plugins before promoting to production.
3. Document execution steps (especially for Warehouse Manager and Project Manager) so the whole team follows the same process.
4. Use production-impacting utilities (Warehouse Manager, i18n Translator) only within a controlled change window.