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.