April Release: Infrastructure updates, new business dashboard and lots of bug fixes

Blog Post:
http://www.businesscatalyst.com/_blog/BC_Blog/post/April_release_-_Infrastructure_updates, _new_business_dashboard_and_lots_of_bug_fixes/

Scheduled to go live on Wednesday, April 18th.

The release date has been moved to Thursday, April 19th to accommodate additional validation for infrastructure updates.

Update:  Thursday, 19 April 2012, 4:00 AM PST - With this release, the system folders are filtered only on Filesystem APIs and File Manager Alpha. System wide FTP filtering will be present in a future release.

We are announcing a new Business Catalyst release, scheduled to go live on Wednesday, April 18th. Following the challenges we faced with R174, we've taken a much closer look at our quality processes and we're doubling down on testing to reduce any potential bugs this release - this leads to less features, but we know after consulting many partners that quality and stability are what's most important.

This release introduces a series of updates that are going to be gradually rolled out in April, whose goal is to take the Business Catalyst infrastructure and platform to the next level in terms of performance and reliability. Additionally, we are continuously improving our new admin interface to bring it closer to a full scale release. Read through the following sections to get detailed information about this release:

• Infrastructure updates
• Features and enhancements
• Issues fixed by this release
• Support updates

You can jump to the corresponding section by clicking the above links.

Infrastructure updates

• CDN– the Content Delivery Network improves initial page load for AdminConsole, by serving files from very fast servers that are close to the computer loading the Admin Console. The CDN support has been turned on April 7 for sites delivered from our European data center and on April 9 for sites delivered from our APAC and North America data centers.

Features and enhancements

New  dashboard for webBasics and webBasics+ plans

With this release, we are going to replace the business dashboard for webBasics and webBasics+ sites with a new simplified version that gets rid of all the unused graphs and information that cluttered the interface, while being built on the new API based UI framework. To streamline the site publishing workflow, the new dashboard exposes features likes  site upgrade, invite new users and add domains.

The redesigned dashboard will be available only from the new Business Catalyst admin user interface (V3).

System folders filtered on FTP according to site plan

Prior to this release, BC system folders such as /Layouts had the same contents on all plans, even though Shop layouts weren't used on webMarketing plan for example. In order to reduce unnecessary traffic and remove noise,  system folders are now accessible over FTP only if the feature is available in current site plan.

Here is the mapping between folders and plans:

Send Secure Zone Login Details email switch

In this release, we've added a new parameter called SWE that decides whether or not the Secure Zone Login Details email will be sent when the form is submitted. By default, this new parameter is not included in the query string and its set to "True" (email will be sent). Partners that want to stop this email from being sent should add "&SWE=False" in the query string when creating a secure zone registration form.  

The already existing parameter named "SAR", that decides whether the WebForm Submission Confirmation AND Secure Zone Login Details emails are sent remains unchanged. For the Secure Zone Login Details email specifically, if any of these parameters is set to "False", the email will not be sent.

Issues fixed in the April release

• Web forms: submitted form confirmation page is now available for webBasics and webBasics+ plans in System Pages
• Web forms: web form builder username and password fields are now hidden for webBasics and webBasics+
• System Pages - "Page content empty" and "No start pages" custom error pages have been removed. Existing customization, if any, will continue to work. These pages are never shown for production sites, as these have proper start pages set.
• Updated My Details screen to add support for Adobe ID accounts management
• Issue 3150655 - Fixed an issue casing newsletter credits to not be updated for additional newsletter overage packages;
• Issue 3149150 - Added the  "File attachments" tab in Web Form builder for sites under the webMarketing plan
• Issue 3128467 - Fixed a bug causing the delete products using Import feature to only delete  the first product from the import file
• Issue 3148553 - Fixed a bug preventing users to login if the secure zone registration form included a redirect using PageID parameter

Business Catalyst V3 updates

• New improved HTTP headers – to improve the Admin/ loading time (not just the first time loading) we are improving the HTTP headers to use more browser level caching and we're adding GZIP compression to all suitable files.
• Fixed a problem causing web apps user interface to hang when adding a new web app field (get satisfaction forum report)
• Fixed a bug in web app setting that was blocking users from deleting a web app field if it had web app items using it
• Workflow approval process for pages and templates is now available in V3 UI (see get satisfaction report)
• Fixed a modal dialog resize problem that was blocking the users view of the window action bar, usually displayed at the button of the screen (see get satisfaction forum post)
• Fixed a bug blocking user from inserting an image from Image Properties screen (see get satisfaction forum post)
• Fixed many small various issues with File Manager Alpha version (thanks for your feedback!)
• Fixed bug causing " Reset to Default" to stop working for  Tasks filters
• Added export button for Pages reports (Reports>Website Content>Pages) (see get satisfaction report)
• Minor style updates for admin ribbon, breadcrumbs and links
• Fixed a bug causing Save Draft to not update the web page status  to "working copy"
• Fixed the Preview web page functionality for web page working copies
• Fixed a bug in web forms causing the web form builder to generate multiple items when creating custom form fields of type List (see get satisfaction report)
• Fixed a admin menu bug that was placing the user under CRM>Customer menu although the current page was CRM>Search
• Added a confirmation message when a case is blacklisted & deleted
• Updated ribbon behavior to use ellipsis for displaying long customer names to prevent layout degradation
• Minor tweaks to the links in the admin ribbon
• Updated the bounced email reports screen to fix scroll
• Fixed a minor issue that was causing an incorrect list name to be displayed after an item (product, campaign, customer, etc) was deleted
• Fixed a bug preventing the "Form Properties" window from closing when user pressed the "Back" button while the pop-up is displayed

Support changes

• New support/chat/forums in place– with this release,  we have updated the Business Catalyst partner support workflows and tools. This change aims to improve the way we support our partners by offering a better support workflow, new forums and chat based on the Adobe support infrastructure. In addition, following the release, partners will be able choose between letting business owners access the Business Catalyst documentation or access a custom documentation. For more details, read the Improved support workflows and new forums blog post.

Thank you,

Cristinel Anastasoaie
Adobe Business Catalyst Product Manager