Business Catalyst Blog

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.

As is standard practice with releasing new features the new DNS Tools will be in Beta for a couple of releases while the engineering team fixes any outstanding usability issues that are reported by you. 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 BC.

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

Thanks for reading, we hope you find these enhancements useful!