miles design - graphic design & web design

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!

Comments (0)  |  Trackbacks (0)  |  Permalink  |  Subscribe  | 

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.

Comments (0)  |  Trackbacks (0)  |  Permalink  |  Subscribe  | 

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.

Comments (0)  |  Trackbacks (0)  |  Permalink  |  Subscribe  | 

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.

Comments (0)  |  Trackbacks (0)  |  Permalink  |  Subscribe  | 

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.

Comments (0)  |  Trackbacks (0)  |  Permalink  |  Subscribe  |