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Masking Password fields in Magento Extensions

Wow, long time, no post – no excuses really*, just been really busy. This post will give you a quick tip for masking password fields in your Magento extensions. I wanted to mask the password in my Google Apps and Gmail Magento Extension and despite a few Google searches, I couldn’t find a simple answer. There’s also not really any good documentation on the various configuration xml files in Magento, it seems.

Thankfully i960 over at the Magento forums gave me this simple tip, which I think should be shared. Here’s how to mask or hide your admin passwords in the backend of Magento. This is particularly useful when creating your own Magento extensions.

In etc/system.xml add xml like this:

 <password translate="label">
    <label>Password</label>
    <frontend_type>password</frontend_type>
    <sort_order>10</sort_order>
    <show_in_default>1</show_in_default>
    <show_in_website>1</show_in_website>
    <show_in_store>0</show_in_store>
</password>

The key being the frontend_type of password in case you hadn’t noticed that.

Anyway expect me to be a bit more active with some Magento tips over the next few weeks.

*In a lot of ways you can blame Amazon for creating some of the worst financial reports I have ever had to work with! Parsing those to pull meaningful information has been like pulling teeth. Anyway I’ll add some feedback on those in an upcomming post.