miles design - graphic design & web design

Business Catalyst has released 3 major feature updates since June. Below are my highlights for business owners:

Free additional mailbox storage

As part of BC's ongoing efforts to provide customers with the best email platform possible, they have upgraded the standard mailbox size to 5GB of storage, up from 2GB. There's no additional cost and there's nothing you need to do to implement these changes. The upgrade has already been completed, allowing both new and existing sites to take advantage of the additional storage.

Blog improvements

Similar to other blogging platforms, BC now allows customers to change a blog post author by selecting it from a list of site admin users. Additionally, site users can now enter a short biography and profile image that can be included in the blog post layouts using the: {tag_blogpostauthorbiography}, {tag_blogpostauthorpictureurl} and {tag_blogpostauthorpicture}. The user can change both user biography and avatar from My Account interface, while site administrators can update them from the user management interface.

Site settings

BC are starting to consolidate some of the site-wide settings in a new section called Site Settings. With this release, they're enabling you to define Facebook, form security (Captcha) and shop settings. In future releases BC plans to allow customers use this interface to update site timezone, country and other global settings.

• Shop settings: you now have the ability to set the shopping cart lifetime (lets you define how many hours a cart content is kept in the system for returning customers) and the ability to enable/disable the productfeed.xml which you can use to publish your products on product directories like Google Product Search.
• Captcha settings: this is used to enforce server side check on Catpcha for the Refer to a Friend, Campaign Subscription and Comments forms. The forms built with our web forms engine have this setting incorporated and they check for Captcha only if you've added the field when you've created the form
• Facebook settings: this is where you can enable Facebook login for your site and enter your Facebook application details (URL, App ID and App Secret Key)

Customisable SEO Friendly URLs for Web Apps

Continuing the work on this feature, BC has now added support for customisable URLs to the Web Apps module. To take advantage of this feature for your web apps, you will need to enable it from Admin > Search Engine Optimization settings page. The new URL will look like:http://www.yoursite.com/webapp-name/webapp-item-name. The web app item URL part is automatically generated from the web app item title and can be modified when editing an web app item. Similarly, you can edit the web app url, which can be edited from the manage web app screen.

Customisable workflow notifications

One of the most requested features on BC's wish list was to give site administrators a way to customise workflow notification emails to include relevant information or to have it translated in the site user's language. BC has now provided a solution that offers the ability to customise those workflow notification emails from the "Customize System Emails" area.

This notification template will work for all workflow notifications and can be customised by adding different tags, changing From: address or email Subject: fields. Configuration window will be similar to other system emails. 

Further enhancements to the customisable workflow & order notifications:

• Made the new layouts available through FTP. Starting next week, you can use Dreamweaver or any other FTP tool to grab the files and edit them, as well as doing bulk transfers between sites.
• Added new tags to Packing Slip and Package Label layouts: {tag_shippingattention} has been added in the Packing slip template while {tag_invoicenumber}, {tag_shippingattention}, {tag_shippingdescription} and {tag_shippinginstructions} have been added to the Package Label layout.

Order status change notifications

This is an essential e-commerce feature for keeping paying customers up to date with the status of their online order. We want to make sure that when an order status is changed, the customer will be notified of the new order status. For example, when an order is shipped, an automated email is sent to that customer with a proper notification.

The e-mail message template used for customer notifications will be available in the System Emails section. The system will generate an email template for every order status and will allow partners and site administrators to pick which order statuses will require a notification. By default, no status types will have any associated notifications set.

Read the Knowledgebase article

AWB tracking number and tracking URL support in orders

One piece of information missing from the Business Catalyst order system was the ability to save a tracking number (AWB) and an URL to the shipping provider web page so that customers can access information about their shipment status in the My Account section or through an order notification email. The June release will enable the following workflows:

• Site owners can assign a tracking number (AWB) and tracking URL to the order once the shipping providers picks up the package. The Update Order user interface now includes these two fields allowing site owners to manually include this information; Automation integration with shipping providers is planned for a future release.
• Administrator/Partner can use this information in Order notification emails layouts and site front-end layouts to make it available to site customers.
• Once the changes are made on the site, customers will be able to track their orders effortlessly. 

Recursive modules (modules inside modules)

You now have the ability to display modules inside modules, including the ability to insert modules inside content holders. Other examples include (but are not limited to):

• Being able to put products or catalogs inside blog posts
• Being able to insert any module inside a web-app list or detailed view (webform module, catalogs/products, literature items)

Other updates

• Social integration updates: BC has improved the social integration support by adding two new modules: Facebook Activity Feed and Facebook Send. Additionally, all social modules are now available in the Insert Module menu from Admin and in the Dreamweaver extension as well.
• Alternate email address: BC has added an additional email field for every user, that will be used to send forgot password emails. This is particularly useful for those users hosting their business email with BC and had to go back to their partner or BC's support team to recover their password. Starting with this release, you will be able to receive the email on a secondary email address at your choice.
• Remove related DNS records: when you remove a domain name or its "www" counterpart, the system will automatically delete all related records (redirects, mail records, etc.) after requesting and receiving a confirmation.
• Added subscribe & unsubscribe to newsletter confirmation pages: this will prevent automatic mailing list subscription or unsubscription to mailing caused by search bots indexing web mail; as a consequence, instead of automatically subscribing or unsubscribing users to mailing lists, BC has added a page requiring users to press a button to confirm their action. You can modify the page content and appearance by updating two additional System Messages layouts: Subscribe Confirmation Form and Unsubscribe Confirmation Form.
• Payment gateways infrastructure updates: payment infrastructure updates for enhanced security and reliability.
• Updated the WYSIWYG editor to the latest version which includes better support for iPad and lots of bug fixes.
• Forum subscriptions: users can subscribe to forums and receive notifications every time a new topic is opened. The email notification template allows you to use topic subject and forum name in the email notification subject, making it more easy to filter and read.
• Updated social integration: added support for Facebook activity feed and Facebook Send as well as updating the Like module to add support for Facebook send.
• Packing slip and package labels: site administrators or drop shipping suppliers now have a way to print packaging list and package label for each order received. Also the templates for both the packaging list and package label can now be customised. Read KB article
• Email marketing: campaigns with 20 or less subscribers are now automatically approved by the system
• Extended FTP support: With the June release BC has extended FTP support by making email campaigns and content holders available through FTP.
• Device specific site wide templates: BC's multi-screen support has just got better by allowing you to define device specific site wide templates. Each template now has a default version for desktop screens and two additional ones (tablets and smartphones). When displaying a page, the system will automatically use the template corresponding to te detected device, if that template has been defined. If no content is defined in a template, the system will fallback to the immediately higher resolution templates (phone falls back to tablet which falls back to desktop).

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Today Business Catalyst released a sneak peak of the preliminary UI design for the new dashboard - click below to enlarge. BC V3 is going to have more of a 'desktop' feel where each module or feature is contained within an App that is launched from the BC Dashboard. For example, to manage your blogs, you will open the Blog App, for your photos you will have a Galleries App, ecommerce gets a Store App, the CRM gets a Customers App and well, you get the idea. The aim of this approach is to provide for all of your end-to-end workflows within individual apps rather than trying to make you skip around the system. We would only turn on the Apps that you need to run your Online Business to keep the system easy for you and the side dashboard navigation menu uncluttered.

Furthermore BC will be building the whole UI in HTML not Flex (turning BC into an Air App) as some have feared so it will work in all your favourite browsers. One of BC's primary UI requirements is to be accessible from iOS devices as well so you will be able to use BC from an iPad! As the BC team builds more and more of the App we'll be able to sneak more previews and details over the coming months.

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As part of the R150 Release on May 11 which included new DNS tools, improved site search and partner consolidated billing, Business Catalyst engineers have worked on some minor improvements to BC including:

1. Enable/Disable Menu Items - there is now a checkbox at the bottom of each dynamic menu item that lets you choose whether a menu item is displayed live on your site. Toggling these on or off means that you don't have to delete a menu item to remove it from the live view anymore.
2. Recurring Billing now pays Affiliate Commissions - when affiliates refer customers who purchase products that have generated a recurring order the affiliate will now be paid commission each time instead of just paying on the initial order.
3. Allowing Recurring Billing for "Process Offline" Gateway - a much requested feature, you are now able to use 'Process Offline' as a payment gateway type for recurring billing. However, please keep your encrypted customers billing details handy as these are only sent once on the initial recurring order.
4. New Tags introduced for ECommerce (Shopping Cart) - for countries such as Australia where store owners are entering prices inclusive of sales tax we now have {tag_producttaxpercentage,percentage} and {tag_totaltaxpercentage,percentage} to use on the shopping cart and invoice layouts which will calculate and display tax based on the retail or sale price entered for the product

Thanks for reading, we hope you find these enhancements useful!

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BC has recently launched a new and powerful set of DNS Management Tools for your BC sites.

In this post, we'll show you how to get started with the new DNS tools and point you towards the relevant articles and resources.

1. Check out the refreshed interface

Our new DNS tools give you full control over the DNS settings for your BC sites.

Simply navigate to Admin > Manage Your Domain to access the updated interface.

From here you can:

1. Setup Domain Names - add your own domain names choose whether you want to host your Domain name externally or re-delegate to your Business Catalyst sites.
2. Forward Domains - allowing you to forward your www records to your non-www records, solving canonical domain issues and helping your SEO.
3. Setup A records - create sub-domains for your site and choose the start page, country and culture for them.
4. Setup CNAME records - add any number of sub-domains and point them to externally hosted websites and services, or to another A record that you've created on your site
5. Setup MX Records - quickly and easily set up external hosted mail services
6. Setup Advanced records - add your own TXT, SPF, SRV or AAAA records

2. Read the brand new DNS tutorial

As with all new feature releases, BC has updated our documentation to provide clients with a detailed run-through of how to use the new DNS management features.

To familiarise yourself with the new DNS setup process, it's important you refer to the following article:

• Setting up DNS and Re-delegating Domain Names

The article will explain the process for adding new domain names, all the way through to setting up sub-domains and externally hosted mail services with MX Records.

3. Issues? Check the troubleshooting guide

To help you troubleshoot DNS issues yourself without waiting on a Support ticket, BC has put together a handy troubleshooting guide, sharing their own personal tips for diagnosing DNS-related issues.

• Troubleshooting DNS Issues

Please note that DNS re-delegation is not an instant process - you may need to wait for the changes to propagate before the domain name update becomes effective. If the changes are not visible within 48 hours, please follow the steps outlined in the troubleshooting guide prior to submitting a Support ticket.

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On May 15, Business Catalyst engineers 'flicked the switch' to enable the new site search engine for all BC sites. Both the site search (which searches forums, blog posts, web-app items, products etc) and product search (which searches products only) are powered by the same upgraded engine.

The Result:

• Speed: The new site search is exponentially faster period. Where we used to measure site search result generation in seconds, we are now measuring in milliseconds in the latest performance tests. Even on large sites like businesscatalyst.com, search results are being returned almost instantaneously for commonly occurring keywords.
• Search Terms Highlighted in Results: In the text blurb displayed below the result link the search will now display the text fragment that surrounds the search terms to give a better context for the result. The search terms themselves will be highlighted. In the past the system would display the first paragraph of the item description.

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If you login to your BC sites and click on Support Central in the top right corner, you'll notice that it's been redesigned. That's because BC have moved all the content from the Online Business Wiki into a Knowledgebase that now forms the centre of Support Central. For all things BC this is the place to go for answers. The new Knowledgebase brings a bunch of benefits including:

• Improved Navigation - with articles sorted by topic or by where they belong on the user interface it's much easier to browse what you're looking for
• Improved Search - don't want to browse? The new search in the Knowledgebase completely knocks the socks off the Online Business Wiki search with a much more complete set of results for any term

As with Sitewalk, the Online Business Wiki will stick around for another 12 weeks while the Knowledgebase is in Beta as BC iron out any small kinks. Additionally the BC Support team will be busy adding new articles to the Knowledgebase and editing current ones to make them easier to understand.

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Business Catalyst's newest feature - InContext Editing - is now available in the Administration area and ready for use. It's a next generation tool that gives business owners greater control over their websites. You can now make changes more easily without compromising the overall design of your website. Some of the main benefits include:

• The ability to set editable regions within any web page to limit scope of change and preserve design quality
• Content editing is more intuitive - you edit "InContext" on the page rather than having an editor pop-up as was the case with Sitewalk
• The new InContext content editor is much more robust compared with the Sitewalk text editor

Please note that InContext Editing will be in Beta for the next 12 weeks during which Sitewalk will continue to remain available. When the Beta period ends, Sitewalk will reach end-of-life and will be removed from the Administration area. During the Beta period for InContext Editing BC will continue to make small improvements.

To learn more and get started, click on Website > InContext Editing link.

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