As previously announced, we've recently launched a new and powerful set of DNS Management Tools for your BC sites.

We'd like to thank everyone who has provided feedback about the feature via the Community Forums, in the comments of this blog and our Facebook page - your suggestions go a long way in helping our engineering team improve the feature for the entire BC community.

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 our brand new DNS tutorial

As with all new feature releases, we've updated our documentation to provide you and your clients with a detailed run-through of how to use the new DNS management features.

To familiarize 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 our troubleshooting guide

To help you troubleshoot DNS issues yourself without waiting on a Support ticket, we've put together a handy troubleshooting guide, sharing our 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.

Here at BC, we've been busy developing a brand new, on-demand training solution for our Partners. Today, we're giving you a sneak peek of the new curriculum by making the first five video courses freely available to all Partners via AdobeTV!

First up: Getting Started with your BC Partner Account

In this episode we'll begin by introducing you to the BC Partner Portal, the control center for your web design business. You'll learn how to manage your BC web pages and site content. Next we'll show you how the new Dreamweaver BC extension allows you to customize your sites look and feel and leverage powerful Dreamweaver features like templates, Live Mode, global CSS styling and Inspect mode.

You can watch all five episodes of the series over at our new "Learn Business Catalyst" channel.

Stay tuned for other exciting Partner Training updates over the coming months!

Go ahead! I dare you - it is blazing! As I wrote in my last post, after our software upgrade last Monday we had to rebuild the site indexes for all BC sites across all of our data centers. The indexing task was completed at 3pm this afternoon and the engineers have just '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.

Some Partners have asked whether or not features like keyword stemming and wildcards are supported. We are looking to add these to site search in the future. In the meantime your clients' customers will still have a lightning fast and accurate search to help improve their website usability without you having to make any modifications at all.

Remove Unused Tags from Your Blogs

Finally I want to mention that we have now also enabled you to delete blog tags when you aren't using them anymore. You just need to click the little 'delete' icon next to each tag to remove the tag permanently from the system.



Just another bit of good news to go with a Friday afternoon. Happy Weekend everyone!

This morning Business Catalyst deployed release 150 to our production servers across all data centers. When you login to your BC Sites or your Partner Portal you'll see that you've now got access to some much anticipated new features...

Improved DNS Management Tools

We're now giving you full control over the DNS settings for your BC sites. Go to Admin > Manage Your Domain, the interface has been updated to allow you to:

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 Business Catalyst sites.
2. Forward Domains - this is a big win! Any of the domains and sub-domains that you setup on BC can be forwarded to other domains that are hosted on your site (save for circular forwarding). 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.

Automatically Invoice and Charge Your Clients for Hosting at Prices You Set

For Premium Partners at BC, you now have the ability to use BC to set your own hosting prices and then automatically invoice and charge your clients for their hosting on a monthly or annually recurring basis. This high-value feature is called 'Consolidated Billing' and is accessed via Partner Portal > Billing > Consolidated Billing.

When you enable it, it works by creating a set of products inside your Partner Site that correspond to the different standard plans offered by BC and rebranded by you. You can set the prices of these products by editing them in your Partner Site. In addition you will need to add a Payment Gateway such as Authorize.net which allows recurring billing so that your Partner Site is able to send invoices to your clients.

On creating a new site, you will have the option of selecting 'Bill-on-Account' as the billing method for this site and your clients will be charged at the rates you set. In addition, trial sites will now have a 'Upgrade' button in the corner so your clients can upgrade their own sites and pay the hosting rates that you've set.

With your Partner Site sending out the monthly or annually recurring invoices to your clients BC will send you 1 bill at the end of each month to charge you monthly in arrears for all the sites that are using 'Bill-on-Account' as per out standard pricing structure. Learn more about Consolidated Billing by downloading the guide here.

Upgrade Site Search Goes Live on Friday!

With this release we've upgraded the engine powering site search running on BC sites. The new site search will provide much faster search performance for sites and better keyword matching. In particular the search results for multiple keywords will be more accurate and more complete.

Although the feature has been released, the indexing of all sites hosted on BC will only be completed by this Friday morning (US PST). Once the indexing is complete, the engineering team will be able to switch the site search from the current engine to the new engine and I'll be posting to communicate this change. This is a seamless upgrade and does not require any action from BC Partners or Site Owners.

Some More Little Enhancements…

As an added bonus our 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