The Website Forge team has performed upgrades -- most of them specifically asked for by YOU, OUR CUSTOMERS!
Here is the technical dump of upgrades. I'll elaborate on some of the features in detail in later posts.
1) SEO features (used to significantly increase the relevence of each individual product in your catalog within the search engines):
- Google Analytic IS NOW DIRECTLY CODED into the Website Forge engine!
On the Site Template and Settings you can enter the ID of your Google Analytics account and it will be automatically added to every site page without any code insertion or programming.
- Category and item metadata - For each category or item of Ecommerce, Membership, Ad, Locator and Gallery module you can now specify Page Title, Description and Keywords. Page Title and Description can be set to "Automatic" (in this case they will be derived from regular Title and Description), or "Custom". Keywords can be either "Custom" or "None".
- Pages containing a category listing or an item details will automatically take their title and meta data from the category/item. The title of the page itself and the site title is added to the category/item title. Example:
Site Title :: Page Title :: Category/Item Title
- On Site Template and Settings, you can select WHICH WAY the title is shown: with different separators ("::", "-" or "/") and in forward (site-page-category/item) or reverse order (category/item-page-site).
SEO related changes in the Blog module:
a) For Blog, currently you can specify SE metadata only for categories.
b) If no meta description and no regular description is specified for a category, the text of the newest post displayed will be used.
c) For posts, description will be always taken from post text, and the title will be taken from the post title. I'll add the ability to override them later.
2) Taxes: You have GREATER TAX FLEXIBILITY
- On the Taxes form, taxes can be configured to be calculated either on the Billing Address (like currently) or Shipping Address.
3) Credit Card Auth-only mode.
- On Ecommerce Payments Settings form, there is an option for "authorization only" transactions. Only Linkpoint and Authorize.net support this option. Other payment systems will produce an error message during payment.
4) Ecommerce masking:
- Item-level discounts can now be masked. (needed for specific project)
5) Membership/Ad recurring payments.
- Are configured in the same places as the regular pricing settings. Still need couple of days for tuning and debugging.
6) Member's Area appearance and usability improvements.
- You'll find them yourself :) The menu on the left now "floats" as you scroll down the page to make it easier to user. The popup menus are also improved. ** The team is currently debugging some issues found in IE 6.0 and will be resolved soon. **
7) BLOG RSS subscription:
- Browsers will detect the RSS feed on the blog and show an RSS subscribe icon.
Shane Merem
Web Design and E-commerce