Hello everyone, your friendly forum moderator here.  I'm very happy to share with you something we've been working on and thinking about for some time.

Today, along with the release of our latest version, we've also completely reworked the Community Forums. The old forums are still available and will continue to be for a few weeks (after which they will become "read only"), however we ask that you start posting new threads in the new forums. If there are particular old posts which were missed and need to be answered or you think are particularly valuable in terms of information, please *bump* them and we'll consider moving them over. While a valuable resource, the old forums have become a bit long in the tooth to moderate and often people will bump threads that are years old and have nothing to do with their current issue. This makes it hard to have a conversation and also provides lots of conflicting information.

Our new forum listing is more than doubled and much more specific in name, which should make them that much more browse-able. Additionally, new forums exist for discussions that obviously needed to happen, but weren't necessarily pertinent to any specific system area. Some examples of these are:

• HTML/CSS/JS Forum - The idea here is to provide a place to talk shop, show off tutorials you find interesting, provide resources for awesome new libraries, etc.
• Marketplace - Partners are finding themselves in more and more situations that involve  taking on work that beyond their areas of expertise. Luckily we have a great community of partners with expertise in a myriad of competencies.
• API & Third Party Integration - We find more and more people wanting to extend BC or complement it with another service. Up till now, there really wasn't any area to discuss this fully and we really want to foster more conversations about methodology and availability of solutions.
• General Discussion - This is an area to talk about... well we're not really sure. To begin, we plan on having a thread of Show & Tell so you can show off your work.
• Newbie Corner - No question is a stupid question here, if you feel truly lost in the BC well of knowledge post here and someone can help you along. This will be a great spot for free partners to get their wings and old partners to offer a helping hand.

We want you to talk shop, to have conversations about the reasons behind your design concepts, show off your slick AJAX hackery, etc.

We hope our new layout will enable a more conversational approach to the forums, while maintaining them as the educational resource they have become. We will continue to moderate the forums and jump in as necessary when we can provide an answer unique to our abilities. And don't forget our BC secret agents who prefer to remain anonymous.

However, at the end of the day its all about enabling you and providing a way to pass along your experience. I would like to personally thank Liam, Matthew, Vincent , and all of the other regulars I am forgetting for contributing so much to our community.

Cheers,

Justin Price - Adobe BC Forum Moderator

This is a note to inform you that the scheduled system upgrade for last Tuesday 25 August was canceled due to the Quality Engineering team detecting 2 bugs that warranted a roll-back. The bugs were found during the validation stage of the deployment and included:

1. Web-App items displaying full HTML markup in the editor while it was in 'Design' mode when they should have been marked-up while being edited. For example text that should have been bold was displayed as <strong>text</strong> in the WYSIWYG editor.
2. Comments previously submitted with an empty 'Website' field would cause 'An Error Occurred' screen when the comments were viewed in the Admin Console.

Although these issues seem relatively minor the engineering team decided the most prudent course of action was to rollback the release, investigate the causes and fix the bugs rather than continuing ahead and introducing them into the production environment.

We have now fixed the bugs and rescheduled the system upgrade for next week. I've listed below the deployment time across the major timezones our Partner Community is present in:

• Tuesday 31 August 1:00 AM PDT (San Francisco)
• Tuesday 31 August 4:00 AM EDT (New York)
• Tuesday 31 August 9:00 AM BST (London)
• Tuesday 31 August 6:00 PM AEST (Sydney)

While we do not anticipate any major disruptions to Business Catalyst service the system upgrade will take a few hours. During this time you may experience some slight degradation in system performance and it is advisable to schedule your work and client demos around this window.

We're happy to announce a jam-packed line up of exciting Business Catalyst sessions at this year's Adobe MAX conference! Attending MAX is a great opportunity to network with your fellow designers and developers.

You can view the agenda below, which includes a range of dedicated BC sessions catering to both new and experienced Partners.

Top 3 Reasons to Attend MAX 2010

1. See real-world examples of the platform in action, with Jason Tinnin from SimpleFlame sharing his best practices for building and selling sites on Business Catalyst.
2. Take the spotlight and share your BC tips and tricks during the all-day BC Unconference. This is your opportunity to stand up and be heard by your peers.
3. Meet the team and have a drink on us - we'll be running a series of events where you can sit down with the people behind BC to discuss your thoughts and concerns.

...and of course, all of your favorite Adobe tools will be on show.

To get your hands on a conference pass, make sure you visit the MAX website and register today!

RSVP via Facebook and Receive a Free T-Shirt!

If you're planning to attend, we have a special treat for our Facebook fans! Register to attend our BC @ Adobe MAX 2010 Facebook event before September 7th and we'll reserve a free Adobe BC T-Shirt for you at the event - so don't miss out.

The BC Unconference

Come together with fellow members of the Business Catalyst community in discussing the past, present and future of eCommerce and Online Businesses. In an open, casual environment, you'll:

• See presentations from successful BC Partners
• Be in the driver's seat of open panels and topical discussions
• Have the opportunity to stand up and share your own personal BC experiences with the community

Have a great idea for a discussion topic or presentation? Submit your BC Unconference topic today!

We'll be opening up a form for you to submit your presentation topics in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more details.

Hands-on Training with John Ulliman

If you're new to BC, this is the session for you!

Join the man behind our great "Getting Started" training series to learn how you can build business websites faster using Business Catalyst and Dreamweaver.

These sessions run across three days (Mon, Tues, Wed) and are a great way to get up and running with the BC platform.

The Agenda

Sunday, 24 Oct

• Evening – Have a drink on Adobe and network with your fellow BC Partners – further details will be announced closer to the event

Monday, 25 Oct

• 5:00pm – How to Build Business Websites Faster with Business Catalyst and Dreamweaver hands-on training with John Ulliman
• Evening – Welcome Reception
• 8:00pm – Meet the BC Team

Tuesday 26 Oct

• 8:00am – How to Build Business Websites Faster with Business Catalyst and Dreamweaver hands-on training with John Ulliman
• Evening – MAX Bash

Wednesday 27 Oct

• 8:00am – 3:00pm – BC Unconference
• 8:00am – Adobe's New CMS for Business: Real-World Case Studies in Business Catalyst with Cesar Keller from SimpleFlame
• 1:30pm – How to Build Business Websites Faster with Business Catalyst and Dreamweaver hands-on training with John Ulliman
• 4:00pm – How to Build Business Websites Faster with Business Catalyst and Dreamweaver hands-on training with John Ulliman

Are you planning to attend? Make sure you RSVP to our Facebook event before September 7th and we'll reserve a free, limited edition Adobe BC T-Shirt for you at the event!

Business Catalyst has scheduled it's next major system update on 25 August 1:00AM US PDT. The deployment will take a few hours but we anticipate no disruptions to the Business Catalyst service during this time. 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?

• Customizable SEO Friendly URLs for Announcements: Continuing the work started with Catalogs and Products, we're extending the support for customizable URLs to the Announcements module. To take advantage of this feature for your announcements, you will need to enable it from Admin > Search Engine Optimization settings page. The new URL will look like: http://www.yoursite.com/announcements/announcement-title. You will also have the option of customizing the 'announcements' folder name not only the 'announcement-title' segment.
• Updated "Training" Section in Partner Portal: with this release we're rolling-out a number of new training videos to provide standard and premium partners with on-demand advanced technical training. Look in your Partner Portal in the Training Tab and you'll see the new Core Courses and Advanced Courses tabs. You will find a series of training videos covering eCommerce, Webforms & CRM, Email Marketing and Web-Apps. We hope this helps our new Partners build more sites on BC!
• Improved Image Thumbnail Generation: We’re introducing a simplified method to generate image thumbnails which will replace the exiting ShowThumbnail.aspx method. To use the new functionality to generate an image thumbnail for an image located at /images/cat.jpg users can query parameters in the URL like so: /images/cat.jpg?action=thumbnail&width=80&height=80. By default, the output format of the thumbnail will match the original image i.e if you request a thumbnail for a jpeg image, it will also be generated as a jpeg. A specific format can be forced using the “format” parameter, with possible values including 'jpg', 'jpeg', 'gif' and 'png'. The old method of using ShowThumbnail.aspx will remain available for at least a few months, but we plan to deprecate it eventually as it's usage decreases.

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 the following key bugs.

Bug fixes that will be deployed with the August Release

• Updated DNS management to allow users to set domain names hosted externally as default URLs
• Fixed a tax computation issue that was causing the {tag_productsubtotal} to add 0.01 cents to the total price of some combinations of 3 products
• Deleting an URL redirect from the Manage URL redirects interface no longer deletes the source page
• InContext Editing Save and Save & Publish buttons are now correctly functioning even when page does include widgets (ex: twitter, bookmark/share this)
• Fixed an InContext Editing issue which didn't allow users to Save and Publish when the template contained a link to a css file on another domain
• Updated site search engine so that deleted web app items and products are removed from the search index.
• Fixed a currency symbols display issue in the secure PDF sent via "Process Offline" payment gateway
• Added better messaging & warnings describing the steps required to prevent automatic payment of already issued invoices when disabling a recurring payment
• Fixed a site enable/disable issue causing user disabled web app items to become enabled when the site is globally enabled by the system
• Fixed a resource problem causing the Main menu in Admin section to remain in English, even when language changed to something else; note: some resources are available only in English;

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

Great news for our Business Catalyst Partner community in Australia! Earlier this week the systems and engineering team flicked the 'On' switch for our much anticipated Asia-Pacific Datacenter. Located in Sydney, Australia, it's now online and all new sites that are being created with "Australia" chosen as the data center location will reside on the brand new hardware there.

This is an important milestone in building a more reliable and scalable platform for you to deploy Business Catalyst sites on. Since the Adobe acquisition of Business Catalyst, we have now built and deployed 3 new data centers in 3 geographies across USA, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. They are now all accepting new customers.

Closing the Legacy Datacenters

With 3 of 3 planned datacenters online, one of our highest priority engineering goals shifts to closing down the legacy data centers. The engineering team continues to focus on developing the site migration tools that will enable us to move existing sites from the legacy datacenters to the new datacenters automatically. Building tools for moving sites for an all-in-one hosted application like Business Catalyst are complex and latest indications are that these will be available in sometime in the first half of 2011. I will of course keep the community up-to-date with our progress along the way.

In the meantime we will continue to monitor and maintain the existing data centers with the same level of effort as our new data centers. Moving sites from legacy data centers to new ones will not be possible and Business Catalyst cannot assist with this until our migration tools are available.

Until next time, your friendly neighborhood Product Manager :)