Business Catalyst October Release NotesWe are announcing a new Business Catalyst release, scheduled to go live next week. This release includes additional improvements to spam management, support for SFTP for better security, new beta features and bug fixes. The deployment will take a few hours but we anticipate no major disruptions to the Business Catalyst service during this time.
Read through the following sections to get detailed information about this release:
You can jump to the corresponding section by clicking the above links.
Features and enhancements
Support for SFTP connections
Business Catalyst now supports the SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) protocol when connecting to sites remotely via Dreamweaver or other supported clients.
For information on making the switch and a list of supported clients, please refer to the following article: Connecting to your site using SFTP.
Please note: We will close regular, plain text FTP support by December this year. With this update, new sites setup in Dreamweaver will use SFTP by default.
Improved spam management for comments and forums
Following on from our recent integration of Akismet for tackling Comment spam, we’ve extended this feature to now manage spam for the Forums module. This feature sits seamlessly alongside the manual “mark as spam” feature for Forums, and works the same way as Akismet filtering for Comments does today. For more information on spam filtering for forums, refer to this article: Managing spam on Forums.
For Comments, we’ve also enhanced spam options, allowing you to set the system to automatically delete comments and associated CRM records if filtered by Akismet. Check out the updated article for details on setting this up.
Other changes
- Support for Internationalized domain names - we’re opening up support for Internationalized domain names in Business Catalyst, which consist of characters from scripts other than English – such as Chinese, Arabic, or Russian. Adding and modifying IDNs will follow the same process as regular domain names.
- Enhancements to the new Module/Tag Toolbox - We’ve completed the rollout of the new Module/Tag Toolbox across the new Admin Console for both Partners and their clients. Based on customer feedback, we’ve also tweaked the way in which the toolbox displays for business owners versus Partner users – by default, the toolbox will now initially be closed for business owners when editing pages, email newsletters etc.
- Replaced Tag insert drop-down with the new Toolbox - with this release, we have updated the new admin interface and replaced the tag insert drop-down from inside the editor with our new Toolbox.
- Updated Product Detail interface - in the new admin user interface, we have moved the inventory section from product details into it's own tab to make more visible and easier to access. Additionally, we have replaced the "Hide If Out of Stock" and "Can Pre-Order" checkboxes with a drop-down that better describes the options a site owner has when setting-up inventory management.
Beta Features
Product inventory control for attributes
This much anticipated feature enables your clients to manage product inventory and stock levels based on what we now call “variations”. You can enable this on a site-by-site basis from the new Site Settings > Beta Features section of the Admin Console.
The beta rollout will include:
- Back-end user interface updates for managing stocks per variations
- Updated tag syntax to support product variations
- Enhanced e-commerce and customer reports to include product variations; an additional enhancement to reports now allows customers to view the product attributes in the customers and orders reports
What's not included:
- Import/Export products to support product variations
- API updates to support variations
Email list segmentation
Continuing the improvements on our email marketing system, we are simplifying the process required to send targeted email campaigns by enabling customers to filter customer lists during the email campaign creation. List can be filtered based various information already stored in the system like user actions or CRM data. This new feature is accessible in beta from the new Site Settings > Beta Features section of the Admin Console.
Issues fixed in this release
- Issue 3319200 - Fixed the Export Report under Subscribers in Email Marketing > Mailing Lists any list w/ subscribers does nothing
- Issue 3324861 - Fixed an issue causing the DIBS return page to display a blank page and orders not recorded as paid in the CRM system
- Issue 3332525 - Import in campaigns email campaign wizard & mailing lists are now linked with mailing list permissions instead of administer system
- Issue 3333485 - Improved performance on campaign lists to prevent timeouts
- Issue 3334627 - Exposed /ModuleTemplates/SocialMedia folder is now exposed in File Manager and FTP for webBasics and webBasics+ plans
- Issue 3337042 - Fixed an encoding issue causing the Toolbox to show "An error occurred" when a site contains a web app with invalid characters in his name; (this issue has been already deployed through a hot-patch)
- Issue 3337055 - Fixed an issue preventing the Toolbox from being displayed in the new admin interface when editing webapp items (this issue has been already deployed through a hot-patch)
- Issue 3340813 - Updated Toolbox module filters to display the AdRotator module when editing a site on a webMarketing plan
- Issue 3337900 - Fixed an error occurring when deleting an web app item from front-end
- Issue 3340858 - Fixed an issue preventing multiple templates from being used when applied to web app list included in a content holder
- Issue 3341790 - Added a close button on Toolbox when displayed in the editing web app items screen
- Issue 2997962 - Fixed an issue preventing the billing address from being saved
- Issue 3214348 - Updated Visitors report Geographic location to also count the entries with missing information and display "not set" when the visitor's country couldn't be determined
- Issue 2938451 - Updated the Admin->WebApps->Custom fields interface to fix an issue that was adding an extra space when saving large data sets
- Issue 3051266 - Fixed an issue with the multiscreen templates causing the 404 - Page Not Found page to always display the desktop template
- Issue 3305741 - Fixed an issue causing secure zone expiry date to be updated for all secure zones that the user has access to when purchasing access to a specific paid secure zone
- Issue 3305731 - Fixed an issue preventing users from login into a valid secure zone when access is marked as expired for another secure zone
- Issue 2709720 - Fixed an issue causing the $ sign to not be displayed in the invoice layout for {tag_producttaxpercentage,10}
- Issue 2924821 - Increased the maximum character limit to 4000 for Text Multiline field type in Web Form Builder
- Issue 3346312 - Fixed an issue causing deleted products to no longer be displayed on invoices and orders
Thanks!
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