In this issue we've added a bunch of useful tools to help you manage orders, users and for designers we've added improvements to the templates flows, let's dive in.

Order Management Improvements

• Shipping labels 
  You can now print simple shipping labels direct from the order manager screen. 
  This is available in order manager as well as on the new order items view.
  Want to rename shipping labels? Edit it in definitions > SHIPPING_LABEL
  The default is fairly simple but you can also change the display in the html/invoice/shipping_label.html.twig template.
  Need something more complex? Reach out to us via the support system. 
• Purchase order templates
  Customise the display of your purchase orders to suit your needs.
  Though editable before they are now available as full templates in html/invoice/purchase_order.html.twig
• Order manager products search improvement
  Previously searching for product purchases would return a different table view of orders only showing that search product. 
  Now it returns all orders with full details like the rest of  order manager for full visibility.
  Looking for more specific product details per order? Try the orders tab when editing a product.  
• Order manager user group filter
  You can now filter order manager to show only a specific group of users orders, useful for tracking specific companies via groups or comparing trade to retail orders.  
  Available in the filters on Admin > Order Manager.
• Customizable order status tabs in Order Manager
  The tabs at the top of Order Manager are fixed to help you find orders fast. 
  You can now add your custom statuses to these tabs in Order Statuses > Add/Edit > tick to "Show on Order Manager".
• Buying rule quantity ranges
  You can now setup quantity based rules for when a buying rule kicks in
  New changes that come with this:
  Add/Edit product > when buying rules are setup you can now multi select them
  Add/Edit product > "Quantity in pack" under buying rules (on edit product that's on the prices tab)
  Buying Rules > Add/Edit > Quantity limits > Min/Max can now be set so the rule only triggers if the cart qty of matching products to this rule is above the max or below the min.
  Page content used in Buying Rules, now supports a products tag which can be used to list all matching items.
• Pinned orders
  Sometimes you need to keep an eye on a few orders, pinning them brings them to the top of the list and shows them on the dashboard.
  Available via a new pin icon column on order manager. 
• Order manager result limits
  Available in Admin > Order Manager > "Limit by" shown bottom right under the table.
  Allows: 25, 50 (default), 100, 250 & a max of 500 orders at a time, useful for batch updating & saves to a cookie to keep the setting going.

General Improvement Features

• Collect Google Reviews from your site
  Want to collect reviews for you Google business page direct from your site or display them back on your site? Contact us to find out more. 
• Add/edit user addresses
  You can manage user addresses easier when adding users, as well as access to all addresses entered via a new addresses tab on users.
  Available in Admin > Add User > Add Addresses & Edit User > New Addresses Tab
• Switch to only send SMS alerts to UK customers
  This is currently enabled by default if you send SMS alerts to users after they place orders. 
  Untick this to support sending international, however your charges may vary based on your international setting with your SMS provider.
  Available in Admin > Settings > Leads & Alerts > Send SMS alerts only to users in the UK

Security / spam protection

• Require Google Recaptcha on Register & Guest Checkout Registrations
  If you're getting an increase in spam accounts, requiring users to tick that they are not robots is a great protection against this. 
  Available in Site Settings > General > Registration > "Require Google Recaptcha During Registration" (requires Google Recaptcha setup in the Connect area)
• Logout's now trigger a cache refresh using the new " clear-site-data" HTTP response header. 
  Sometimes you might try a logout to refresh a session but now we'll also reload your browsers cache for your site when you logout to help make sure everything is refreshed. 

Front end developers

• Templates search
  When in a template folder you can now search the files to quickly find any text and then proceed to edit it, speeding up this workflow in admin for quick edits.
• Fork, Edit, Preview & Flatten workflow
  A new simpler workflow for making changes to existing sites. 
  Forking a template lets you make changes on a preview and then "flatten" down into the live template when you're ready to go live with them.
  Read more on this optional new flow here.
• Nicer SCSS & Twig error messages
  You'll now see more informative errors while editing templates to help point you towards any errors. 
• Autoloading css & js for  modules now works in child templates
  Modules automatically load in their css & js, this now following through into the child templates for you. 

Thanks for reading! Do you have a new feature idea? Suggest it here and others can vote on it. 

 

Day to day, the majority of code changes we make are to existing sites. 

The flow for working on new sites via FTP works fairly well, you can make changes and not worry as it's not live y… Continue Reading »

In this issue we've been re-focusing on tools to help build new sites and helpful usability improvements for maintaining existing ones, let's dive in.

Improvements

• Stricter password requirements & password strength meter optionally available. 
  By default we still only require passwords to be 8 characters, but you can now show a password strength meter & optionally enforce only strong passwords.
  Available in Admin > Site Settings > Security > Password
  
• Addresses will now be title cased when saved.
  This happens automatically for all billing & delivery addresses when created or saved.
• Added the ability for select inputs to have placeholders
  Available in Admin > Form Builder > Edit Form > When add/editing a select field you can now set placeholder text.
• A few fixes arising from recent Google Search Console alerts
  Such as compare lists no longer being indexed (as they do not need to be) and product review microdata will now only come through when a product has reviews to avoid sending zeros for ratings. 
• Google Analytics > Custom Dimensions
  Available in Admin > Connect > SEO > Google Analytics & Adwords > Custom map {} for custom dimensions and metrics e.g. {"dimension1": "ecomm_prodid"}. Example uses of this could be tracking readership by author, impact of out-of-stock products on conversion, different behaviours of loyal customers using a logged-in parameter (read more here), tracking different types of users/roles which is identified when forms are filled in.
• Email manager multiple tags
  Available in Admin > Email Manager > When sending emails you can now select multiple user  tags per group to send to at once. (Hold shift to select multiple)
• Featured and special product sorting
  New tabs for featured & special offer products available in Admin > Product Manager, in here you can now sort products within the featured or special offer tabs. These override the default sort orders, generally bringing these sorted products to the top of product lists. 
• Delivery method listed in orders CSV
  Delivery & payment method names now show through in the orders CSV report, allowing you to filter columns & compare metrics of how well each method performs in excel or libre/open office.
• Product manager sold date ranges
  New date range selection available on the Product Manager screen which shows the total quantity of products sold. 
• International SMS sending now supported
  Both our Twilio & Textmarketer setups now allow you to send SMS updates to users anywhere in the world by automatically working out their country code.

Developer

• Rivendell default template
  A new default responsive template, find out more in our dedicated post here. 
  https://github.com/ReallyEasyCart/rivendell
• Rivendell Builder
  A series of example header, slider & footer layouts available for new site designs complete with quick instructions to add them in.
  https://design.reallyeasycart.co.uk/rivendell-components/
• REC Design Hub refresh
  https://design.reallyeasycart.co.uk/
• Bring forms into templates more easily with the new rec_form() twig method
  {{ rec_form('Form Name') }}
  You can even pass default options for the inputs based on the input name, e.g.
  {{ rec_form('Contact Form', { input_field_1: 'Bob Smith', input_field_33: 'Worcester' }) }}
• SCSS/Sass to power your CSS templates
  In Rivendell templates you can now use SCSS automatically, as well as in other templates by including a file with the new scss() function, e.g. {{ scss("css/scss/site.scss") }}
• Responsive base based blog posts now use font icons for social sharing to Facebook and Twitter instead of previous icon images.
  This should fit nicer into existing designs and can easily be changed in the blog_info.html.twig template.
• Removing {{ page.content }} from a template now fully removes the page content ckeditor input.
  Allowing you to design layouts entirely based on content blocks. But you can still use page.content where needed and it will correctly position its input in order if it's between other content blocks. 
• We have also switched from FontAwesome (v4.4 previously) to ForkAwesome (v1.1) https://forkaweso.me/Fork-Awesome/icons/
  It has full compatibility with our previous FontAwesome version, plus many new icons. FontAwesome v5 has changed how their icons come in, meaning we couldn't auto-upgrade to v5, but ForkAwesome is an open source project that aims to continue the great work of the old FontAwesome project. 
  Nothing should change for you, it'll work just as it did before but with a few new icons available.
  Also, if you like v5 of FontAwesome, though not officially supported, you can bring this in on a specific site though you'll need to hook up icons to use yourself. 

Our default responsive base template came out in 2015 and it's served many sites well. 
We've kept it up to date and built many responsive sites from it, but it's 2019 & finally time for a fres… Continue Reading »