System Announcements

Products and Catalogs have been upgraded so their URLs are now editable and more SEO-Friendly. To enable this feature you'll need to follow these steps:

1. In the Admin Console, choose Admin > Google/Bing/Yahoo Optimization.
2. On the Search Engine Optimization page that appears, scroll down and click the option to Enable SEO friendly URLs.

After you enable the SEO friendly URL Feature the system will automatically rewrite all the URLs for your catalogs and products so they become easier for both humans and search engines to read. Products in an online store will use a URL structured in this format:

"http://www.domain.com/catalog/sub-catalog/product-name"

Going forward from this point all new products and catalogs that you add will have SEO-friendly URLs created following these steps:

1. The system will convert the product or catalog name into lowercase characters
2. The system will change any spaces and special characters, such as ampersands (&) and percent signs (%), are changed into dashes (-).
3. If multiple folders, catalogs or products use duplicate names, the resulting URLs are checked for duplicates; as needed, the system appends a numerical suffix of to create a unique URL

When you edit the products and catalogs you will be able to manually edit their URLs in the detailed view if the generated URLs are insufficient for your needs. Please note that due to these changes in Product and Catalog URLs the Product import template has been changed so you will need to export your product list again or download the new template before you edit your products offline and upload afterward.

Please be advised of the following important update from FedEx. Customers using FedEx real-time shipping rate quoting service will be unable to process transactions on Sat 19-Jun from 9pm-11pm CST.

For customers using affiliates, if your affiliate partners refer customers who purchase products that generate a recurring order the affiliate will now be paid commission each time the order is generated instead of just paying commissions once on the initial order.

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. This is useful if you want to remove items from your dynamic menus temporarily or when you're building out a new site but you want to hide unfinished sections by removing the ability to navigate there and enable them later.

You can access this by going to Website > Dynamic Menus > [Menu Name] > [Menu Item]

We are planning a system maintenance in our new US data center in the early hours of Saturday 5/Jun between 12am-2:00am PST. Customers will experience a downtime of up to 10 minutes during this time. This scheduled maintenance will not affect customers using the North America, Australasian or European data centers.

For countries such as UK and Australia where store owners are entering prices inclusive of sales tax (VAT, GST) 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.

To use this tag, you should enter in the prices of all your products inclusive of tax. That way when the products are displayed on your online store their prices will be the final prices that your customers will be paying. To show how much of their product price will be paid as a sales tax in the shopping cart layout simply replace the standard {tag_producttaxamount} tag with a {tag_producttaxpercentag, 12.5} tag where 12.5 is the percentage of tax to be paid.

Both the Site Search (which searches forums, blog posts, web-app items, products etc) and Product Search (which searches products only) have had the technology that powers them upgraded. The search index for your site has also been rebuilt.

How it benefits you:

• Speed - the new site search is exponentially faster. 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, 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.

This was a seamless upgrade, you do not have to make any modifications to your site to take advantage of the upgraded site search. If you didn't have site search on your site before, now would be great time to take advantage of the new version. Add it by using the module manager while you are editing your site pages or site-wide templates and picking the 'Search' option to insert.

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 (and don't forget your passphrase) as these are only sent once on the initial recurring order.

Whenever you set the cycle type for a Product to enable recurring purchases you will no longer be asked by the system to use a Payment Gateway that supports recurring billing such as Authorize.net if your payment gateway is already set to 'Process Offline'

When you go to Admin > Manage Domain Name you'll see the interface has been updated to give you full control over the DNS settings for your site. Extra functionality has been added to allow you:

1. Setup Domain Names - as with the previous DNS manager this allows you to add your own domain names choose whether you want to host your Domain name externally or re-delegate to your site.
2. Forward Domains - Any of the domains and sub-domains that you setup on your site can be forwarded to other domains that are hosted on your site. You are now able to setup your www records to forward to your non-www records for your domains to solve canonical domain issues and stop search engines treating "http://domain.com" and "http://www.domain.com" as two different sites.
3. Setup A records - create subdomains for your site and choose the start page for them. You'll also be able to choose the country and culture which will help in building multi-lingual sites with different subdomains.
4. Setup CNAME records - will give you the ability to add any number of sub-domains and point them to externally hosted websites and services, or you can point them to another A record that you've created on your site
5. Setup MX Records - setting up your sites to use an externally hosted mail service is a breeze now because you have the option to add your own MX records.
6. Setup Advanced records - you can create TXT, SPF, SRV or AAAA records just by choosing a name, a TTL and entering in your record data.

With the canonical domain issue resolved, the ability to create sub-domains, and the ability point them to 3rd party services the new DNS tools are a great addition to the system!

Our 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 we will continue to make small improvements.

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

If you are using the Customer Service Ticketing feature inside your business, now your customer service representatives have access to more granular control around when they receive customer cases. Previously a customer service rep would either be available or not available to receive customer cases. However now, a customer service rep can make themselves unavailable but still receive replies to existing cases assigned to them. This is useful in the case of a manager who may handle escalated cases and wants to continue to receive further communication on that case, but does not wish to receive new customer cases.

We've released a new management interface inside the Administration area for your 301 Redirects. Previously you could only manage these using an import tool. Now you can see a list of your redirects and easily make changes to these.

To access this new feature click on Website->Web Pages and choose 'Manage URL Redirects' via the Action Box.