Why you need this?

On January 1st 2019, the Dutch low rate of 6% goes up to 9%. Instead of setting this manually, or creating a cronjob for it, or a manual script, this extension does the same job. And not just for this tax change, but any tax change in the future. Why spend time on those changes again and again, while you can fix all changes permanently?

Our TaxRatesManager extension makes sure all tax rates remain up-to-date while you don't need to constantly monitor the news on this anymore.

Tech words: Fast coding with Magento 2

While the Magento 1 extension required quite a bit of work in the last couple of months, I was amazed to see how smoothly things could be migrated to Magento 2. Normally, we develop only under Magento 2 nowadays.

However, this extension had great value for legacy shops as well, including one of our own. So we felt obliged to create the code for Magento 1 and decided to do that first: Unit testing is kind of straight-forward, but integration and functional tests are weird under Magento 1. But we did it anyway.

Because of all that work, the rewrite for Magento 2 costed only a few days, mainly to adjust things like namespaces, rewrite integration tests and implement constructor-based DI. But it was easier. So easy, that I tend to say by now that Magento 2 development is easier than Magento 1 development. Once you get the hang of it.

Minor updates for the Magento 1 version

We also released some changes for the Magento 1 version already: On request, we refactored our PHP 7 code (type hinting, strict typing) into a PHP 5.6 release as well (and we'll maintain both simultaneously for a while), because some Magento shops did not find budget to upgrade to PHP 7 yet.

We expect more changes to come in January with a focus on incorporating US tax rates, tests for Brexit and some other things. Stay tuned!