I'm happy to report that the scheduled system upgrade went smoothly on Wednesday, there were no major disruptions which was a positive step forward for us. After some of the glitches with recent system upgrades, the team has invested a lot of time on improving the release process and will continue to do so over the coming months to further increase system stability and reliability especially when new features are released.

What We're Working On For The Upcoming Release

The next system upgrade is due around 25 August. In addition to delivering a number of bug fixes (to be detailed in a later post) our team is focusing on rolling out the following key enhancements to Business Catalyst in the next release:

• Opening our new Asia Pacific Data Center in Sydney which will bring benefits to our Australian Partner community
• Continued improvements to the automated billing functionality for purchasing extra newsletters so that unused pre-purchased newsletters roll-over for up to 12 months from the date of purchase.
• Extending our Customizable SEO Friendly URLs by adding support for the Announcements module
• Adding more on-demand video training for Standard and Premium Partners

The Plan For the Next Few Months

A number of Partners have been requesting for more communication and transparency around our medium term roadmap. While I can't provide any definitive delivery dates, I will share with you what we've identified as our highest priorities for the remainder of 2010. These priorities are representative of where we'll be investing our engineering effort:

1. Rework of DNS Manager: Starting in September we're going to overhaul the DNS manager to make it more usable. We will also correct key bugs such as allowing non-www domains redirect to www domains and setting the www domain as default.
2. Adding Tools for Managing Client Billing: in addition to completing the workflows that support the purchasing of extras such as newsletters and disk space, we're going to be working on adding functionality to enable you to change your clients site plans directly from your Partner Portal
3. Again extending Customizable SEO Friendly URLs for Web-Apps: once we've completed the rework of the DNS Manager, the team will be able to continue implementing SEO Friendly URLs, Web-Apps is the next target.
4. Data Center Migration: this project to build infrastructure for migrating sites is unfortunately much more complex than originally estimated, we're now aiming to migrate sites from old data centers to new data centers around the end of the year

What Happened To The Wishlist?

Many of you will be asking what's happening with the Wishlist and the expected delivery dates listed next to each wish. I've taken the step of removing "delivery timeframe" column from the Wishlist because the unfortunate truth is that they've raised expectations beyond what we've been able to deliver. I also published plans for delivering new features in several blog posts that I posted earlier this year. Those too have regretfully not come to fruition.

So what happened? Looking back, we've had a tough year since the acquisition. I don't want to be making excuses but just to provide an explanation for why we haven't made progress on the Wishlist as planned:

1. We've had to invest a large amount of effort into system stability and reliability, e.g. we've already launched new data centers in New Jersey, USA and Dublin, Ireland, which of course were prioritized over wishlist requests.
2. We acquired a new engineering team to work on the platform shortly after the acquisition. While we had high hopes in the beginning that we could be releasing new features immediately, the reality is that it's taken the team a significant amount of time to familiarize themselves with BC's codebase and architecture. It's only now and moving forward into the future that we'll start reaping the benefits of this investment the engineers have made in understanding BC.
3. As a consequence of switching engineering teams, we underestimated how difficult it was to implement some of your customer requests and so we over-promised in the beginning.
4. Moving forward we need to put a greater emphasis on quality and testing to make sure that new features and bugfixes are stable which means we will be sacrificing some speed in delivering features

I'd like to close off on this topic by saying that the Wishlist has been and will continue to be a great tool by which we receive feedback from the partner community. The list will continue to influence the directions and the decisions we take, but it will not be the product roadmap. As a Product Manager it is my duty to deliver the best Online Business Platform over the medium to long term. This means looking at the big picture and taking into account a myriad of factors such as Adobe's corporate strategy, competitors' developments and so on to make decisions. We recognize the need to get the basics right first and then fully overhaul the platform over the coming years, during this time I will try to work in requests coming in from the Partner Community.

Recapping Last Weeks' Release

Just to highlight a couple of the system upgrades that are now available to you on the production environment:

Separate Layouts for Blog Post Listing and Blog Post Detail View - If you go to Admin > More Customization Options > Blog Layouts you'll see the screen has been slightly updated to give you access to the new 'Blog Post Details' Layout. The main advantage of this is that you can now publish different code in the list and detail layout, thereby customizing the two differently to integrate social media code which wasn't available before. We've also fixed detailed posts so now the post title (instead of the blog title) is shown in the browser title. The updated documentation on blogs and blog layouts can be accessed here:

• Customizing the appearance of a blog
• Publish a blog post
• Extending modules with tag attributes

New Training Videos - For those who've recently upgraded to Standard or Premium Partner Programs at Business Catalyst, we've published a brand new set of up-to-date professionally produced training videos in the Training tab of your Partner Portal. These videos are step-by-step guides designed to help familiarize you with Business Catalyst, teach you key concepts and get you started with building sites for your clients.

For the full list of upgrades and bug fixes please see my release notes published here last week. Thank you very much for reading and understanding, the comment thread is open and I will be paying close attention to approve and answer comments over the coming week.

If you've always wanted to take the user experience of your BC sites to the next level but have been scared by the thought of dipping your toes into the world of JavaScript, then jQuery might just be for you.

jQuery is a popular JavaScript library that simplifies document manipulation, animation and AJAX interactions - letting you do more, with less coding.

What's even better is that jQuery plays nice with the BC platform, allowing you to easily implement advanced front-end functionality, improving the user experience of your sites and speeding up your development process.

In this post, I'll show you how to get started with jQuery, how to start using it on your BC sites and point you towards some handy how-to articles.

1. Getting to know jQuery

Before you dive in and begin using jQuery on your sites, it's important that you have a basic understanding of how jQuery works. If you're well versed in HTML and CSS, you should find the learning curve a little less steep and be on your way in no time.

To get you on the right track, here are some great "Getting Started" articles:

• Tutorial: Getting Started with jQuery (from the official jQuery website)
• jQuery for Complete Beginners: Part 1 (from 1st Web Designer)
• Getting Started with jQuery (from Six Revisions)

2. Including jQuery on your BC sites

Including the jQuery library on your site is as easy as referencing a hosted copy of the .js file inside the head of your page. For this example, we'll reference a copy of jQuery stored inside the "/js/" folder of our site:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>

Because of BC's great site-wide template system, we can easily use jQuery on all of our pages by including the above code in the head of our site's default template.

In terms of hosting jQuery, you have a couple of options to choose from:

1. Host the library yourself
If you'd feel safer hosting the library yourself, you can simply download the latest version at http://jquery.com/ and upload it to a directory on your BC site. For example, many designers host the .js file inside the /js/ directory.

2. Reference an externally hosted version
A number of large enterprises provide hosted copies of jQuery on their existing CDN networks, which are available for public use. For example, Google host a copy that you can easily reference on your site. To use an externally hosted copy, simply replace the "src=" attribute of your script tag with the URL of the version you'd like to include. For example, http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js references a "minified" copy of jQuery version 1.4.2

If you'd like to include the latest version of jQuery hosted on jQuery's own CDN, you can use: http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js

One of the key advantages of using Google's CDN hosted copy of jQuery is that as many websites across the web reference it, the library will be already cached on many of your visitors local machines - this greatly reduces load times, as they'll already have a local copy downloaded when they visit your site.

3. Using jQuery with BC

Once you're up to speed with the jQuery basics and have included the library in your site-wide template, you're ready to go.

To help get you started, we've written a bunch of great tutorials that show you how to enhance BC's built-in features with a little bit of jQuery magic:

• Submitting Web Forms using AJAX and jQuery
• Adding Alphabetical Navigation to Web App Lists using jQuery
• Allowing customers to submit Web App items without being logged in

It's always great to see new and exciting integrations of jQuery with BC - if you've recently completed a jQuery implementation, we'd love to see it in action! Feel free to share your BC + jQuery creations over on the Community Forums or in the comments of this post.

Business Catalyst has scheduled its next major system update on 28 July 1:00AM US PDT. The deployment will take a few hours but we anticipate no disruptions to the Business Catalyst service during this time. After receiving constructive customer feedback relating to recent releases, we're now announcing it early so you can be prepared for the changes that will be occurring next week. The scheduled release includes new features as well as fixes for some of the most important issues reported by our customers.

What’s new in this release of Business Catalyst?

• Adding a detail blog post layout: an individual blog post will now have its own layout, enabling a more granular customization.
• Updating the Admin Console interface for managing blog layouts: to add more clarity in the layout list, we have regrouped the blog layouts list, renamed some of the layouts and updated their description.
• Locked editable regions in InContext Editing: to prevent data loss, InContext Editing now locks editable regions that contain content which has used Javascript widgets to alter runtime presentation and behavior
• Updating Sitemap.xml: when SEO Friendly URLs are enabled, Sitemap.xml will contain the new links in its next refresh (within 24 hours). Disabling SEO Friendly URLs will trigger Sitemap.xml to revert to the legacy URLs.
• Updating "Training" Section in Partner Portal: with this release we're rolling-out a number of new training videos to provide new partners with more on-demand training

Over the coming week, we will be publishing articles on this blog to describe some of the new features in-depth and show how to take advantage of them. In addition to building new features, the team also worked on fixing bugs.

Bug fixes that will be deployed with the July Release

• Recurring payments on SagePay are now processed
• Print View now works correctly on pages displaying catalogs or products after enabling SEO Friendly URLs
• Site Search has been updated to exclude all items using “&OT=” statement
• InContext Editing causing issues sites using Cufon has been fixed by locking editable regions whose content is updated at runtime by AJAX libraries
• Fixed a French translation issue in shopping cart summary and placed the euro symbol after the amount
• Required and optional attributes are now correctly marked in the exported Product List
• Updated Culture drop-down in the Add domain user interface to display “Please select” as default value instead of “Check”
• The “Amount paid” column in “Customer > Orders” screen now displays only successful payments and excludes pending payments
• Fixed a display issue in billing screen to avoid the “set-up fee” defined for consolidated billing being carried over and displayed with “Invoice me directly” payment type
• Added a form validation on the PayPal Payment Data Transfer Token field in Admin > Ecommerce > Payment Gateways > PayPal Website Standard (Optional) section

These fixes will be deployed along with the system update next week.

Introducing a new Product Manager to the Community

I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce Cristinel Anastasoaie to our Partner Community. Cristinel is one of the Product Managers at Business Catalyst and is based in our Bucharest office. He brings a lot of experience to the team having worked at InterAKT Online as a Product Manager releasing Dreamweaver Extensions including MX Kollection and KTML until the company was acquired by Adobe in 2006. At Adobe, Cristinel continued focusing on releasing Dreamweaver extensions for web developers and then moved on to managing The Adobe InContext Editing service until it was merged into Business Catalyst in 2009. You will be seeing a lot more of him around as we focus on better engagement and improving communication with the BC partner community in the coming months.

Dave and Kim Kolb share experiences in growing their business, Hightouchweb.com – ideas that could help grow your design business.

After meeting at a resort, falling in love and being laid off at the 2000 tech bubble burst, Dave and Kim decided it was time to build their own Web company.

By combining and complementing their strengths in strategy, design and marketing, HighTouchweb.com was born.

MP3 audio interview of Dave and Kim Kolb, has them candidly sharing:

1. Finding motivation in each other and maintaining a "CAN DO" attitude, to get through the tough times.
2. Have fun doing it - Love what you do and "whatever you do", do it well.
3. Taking time to follow up with every client (Kim sends personal welcome cards to every one of their customers).
4. Dave shares his feelings on building their own CMS and the pain of using lots of 3rd party open source plug-ins, that didn't always work.

In their words:

• Keep it simple and excel at the basics.
• Don't be all things to all people, you'll drive yourself crazy.
• Know who you are and what you do.

A Business Catalyst feature that benefits their clients:

I hope you enjoy hearing some of their story as much as I did.

Adam :)

Click here for the mp3 interview of Dave and Kim Kolb.

Adding a Facebook "Like" button to your blog posts is a great way to encourage social media sharing within your community and spread your content across the web.

What's even better is that it takes just seconds to implement!

Step 1. Go More Customization Options > Blog Layouts > Blog Post Layout and switch the editor over to HTML mode

Step 2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and insert the following code:

<!-- Facebook Like Button BEGIN --> <iframe scrolling="no" frameborder="0" src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=yoursite.com{tag_permalinkonly}&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=false&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=35" style="border: medium none; overflow: hidden; width: 450px; height: 35px;" allowtransparency="true"></iframe> <!-- Facebook Like Button END -->

Replacing "yoursite.com" with your site's actual domain.

Step 3. Save the layout, and you're done.

You can find out more about the Facebook "Like" button and it's advanced customization options at: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like

• Searching the Knowledgebase to which we're continuously updating content and adding new articles with the primary goal of helping web designers find solutions to help their clients. You'll be able to bookmark articles, share links and browse it in the same fashion as you did the Online Business Wiki.
• Checking System Status - we now have 'System Status' box on the top right of the Support homepage so you can check if you ever feel the system is behaving strangely. 
• Watching our Videos - we have been publishing professionally recorded training videos on Adobe TV. You can browse through the catalog of these under the 'videos' tab where you can learn about best practices on BC and how to sell to system to your clients.
• Booking into our Q&A sessions - these are free for designers to join when they have questions (especially on implementation issues) for which they need live help from a experienced BC Support Engineer via a screencast with audio. These are run twice a week currently, as the demand increases we will increase the frequency as well.
• Browsing and Searching Forums - Looking for help from other partners especially around HTML/CSS and Javascript issues - the forum is where you can join in a conversation to contribute and also look for answers.

With yesterday's upgrade to Business Catalyst you now have the ability to purchase extras for your client sites directly from your Partner Portal without having to submit an accounts case to have it be processed manually. When you login to your Partner Portal, go to the 'Clients' tab and then click on a paid client to see their details, there is a new section at the bottom called 'System Usage' underneath the Invoices.

System Usage shows the limits that are currently applied to your clients' site based on the hosting plan they're on (Mini, Regular, Super) and any extras they've upgraded. You will be able to purchase extra:

• Disk Space - charged annually at $10 per 1000MB
• Bandwidth - the standard allocation has been increased to 1000GB as of this month. Additional bandwidth is charged at $1/GB.
• Users - 1 additional user + 10 email accounts is charged at $5/month, 5 additional users + 20 email accounts is charged at $20/month
• Email Accounts - to add extra email accounts you should purchase the user/email account packages listed in the previous item
• Newsletters - will now be prepaid, packages range from $10 for 1000 newsletters to $570 for 190,000 newsletters
• SMS - charged monthly at $10 for 50 SMS

What's in the Pipeline for Client Billing?

In this release we chose to release the Partner Portal version of the 'Purchase Extras' functionality to test adoption rates, rest assured this feature still has many more enhancements in the pipeline. In the coming releases we plan to roll out enhancements to:

• Enable your clients to purchase extras directly from their Admin Console if they are being billed by Adobe Business Catalyst directly
• Enabling 'Purchase Extras' functionality for Partners and Clients who are using Consolidated Billing so their clients extras charges are also consolidated into one bill
• Enable partners to earn commissions on their clients overages

It's taken a wee bit longer than expected but I'm extremely excited to announce that we deployed a major upgrade to Business Catalyst this morning. In this release we focused on two very significant features:

• Customizable SEO Friendly URLs for Catalogs and Products to make your online stores easier for search engines to crawl and rank and easier for users to read the URLs
• Enabling Partners to automatically purchase extras such as user accounts, email accounts, disk space, newsletters and more for each of their client sites inside their Partner Portal

Enabling SEO Friendly URLs

Because a number of existing Business Catalyst sites relied on the way the legacy URLs were rendered to access images, CSS and Javascript links that use relative paths, the new SEO Friendly URLs feature has been deployed switched-off by default. To switch it on you'll need to go to "Admin > Google/Bing/Yahoo Optimization" and click the "Enable SEO friendly URLs" button in your sites Admin Console.

How Does it Work?

Once you switch the feature on, the system will automatically rewrite all the URLs for your catalogs and products so they become human readable in the format "http://www.domain.com/catalog/sub-catalog/product-name". For all new catalogs and products that you add from this point on, the system will automatically generate an SEO-friendly URL based on the name and also give you the option to edit the URL in the detail view of that catalog or product.

When automatically creating the URLs based on the name the system follows the following process to produce a URL that's optimized for SEO:

1. Converts the whole product name to lowercase characters
2. Converts any spaces and any special characters such as '&' and '%' into dashes ('-')
3. If there is a naming clash with another folder, catalog or product, the system will automatically append a '-' followed by a number e.g "http://www.domain.com/catalog-1" to create a unique URL

Key Points to Note

• Catalog and product URLs will have natural URL 'breadcrumbs' which increases the usability of your online stores. Users browsing your online stores will be able to guess the entry point URL just by typing the catalog name after the domain or move up a level to a parent catalog by deleting the product or sub-catalog segment of the URL.
• When you edit a catalog URL, it will automatically update the URLs for all of the sub-catalogs and products that belong to that catalog.
• External links to your catalogs and products will continue to function as normal because your legacy URLs are internally 301 redirected to the new URLs when the feature is switched on. This is done with the intention of maintaining SEO (i.e there's no duplicate content).

Known Issue #1: Product Import has been Updated

Due to an extra URL field being added to products, the product export/import feature required an update independent of whether the SEO-Friendly URL feature has been enabled for your site. This affects customers who keep a downloaded copy of their products and edit the file using Excel or similar before uploading the file again to update the products in their Online Store.

Solution: To fix the problem, re-export the products to get the updated product import version or download the updated file template. If you have an existing Products file you will need to add the "SEO Friendly URL" column in the 10th column (Column 'J').

Known Issue #2: Legacy 301 Redirects

An existing 301 redirect for a page pointing to a catalog with the same name generates a redirect error when the SEO-friendly URL is switched on. For example, if a 301 redirect for the URL “/example” page is forwarded to the catalog called "example", this will generate an URL redirect error.

Solution: To fix the problem, please remove any existing 301 redirects to the catalogs or products that are generating the error because they have the same name.

Known Issue #3: Special Characters disallowed in Product Name

Due to the requirement to maintain legacy URLs we have not been able to remove the special character restriction in product names even though the name and URL have been decoupled now. This is because if you choose to switch off the SEO-Friendly URLs feature, it may introduce incompatible product names.

Solution: Engineering is working on a solution for this in the near term future.

What's Next for SEO Friendly URLs?

Given that the engineering team has built up a lot of momentum and expertise around the SEO-Friendly URL architecture, our aim is to make this feature available across Web-Apps, Blogs, Announcements and other modules over the coming months so that the BC platform becomes more SEO friendly. Additionally we are also looking to update the Search and the Sitemap functionality so that all search results and sitemap links are rendered with the SEO-Friendly URLs. Hope you enjoy this feature, the new URLs really are a joy to look at and use...

The next video in our "Learn BC" series will help give you a better understanding of key BC concepts and the various modules available in your toolkit when building client sites.

In this episode you'll see how to integrate powerful BC modules in your web designs. We'll begin by taking a closer look at creating a dynamic menu, adding it to a page and overlaying a BC template. From there you'll see how both announcements and image portfolios are managed, and how you can begin moving your own content into your Partner site. Finally, we'll show you how BC customer management is integrated directly into all your web forms, and how visitor's contact data is used to send email campaigns.

Are you new to BC? Make sure you watch all five episodes of the series over at our new "Learn Business Catalyst" channel.