REC's default menu is simple by design, allowing you to customise it without needing to change many declarations & it's also designed to work for the most common use cases as well as being able … Continue Reading »

As usual, we only provide technical support over the Christmas period, namely server and uptime monitoring, starting 4pm on Friday 21st December.
Regular advice, support and project services will be resumed at 9am on Wednesday 2nd January.

Please log any calls on our ticket system as the office will be unmanned for this period.

Merry Christmas & A Prosperous New Year!

This week's issue brings you spam protection improvements, new ways to build up blocks of content on your site & more! Let's dive in:

Highlights

• Akismet Spam Protection  (beta)
  As part of our ongoing battle with spam, form replies can now leverage Akisment's spam blocking capabilities. 
  We'll be offering this to all sites in time but currently, we're trialling this on a few sites to be sure we resolve any false positives, please contact us if you're interested in being part of this trial. 
  Connect > Utilities > Akismet > API Key & "Enable for all Forms"
  Add/Edit Form > "Use Akismet?" (Only shows if API Key is set, overridden if "Enable for all Forms" is set)
• Content Blocks
  Content blocks offer designers the ability to design more complex content areas using templates, whilst the content itself is easily editable within Page Manager by admins.
  Check out our video using these blocks to build up a page.
  In any template you can use the rec_block() template function to access content blocks: {{ rec_block('block name here', type="text or html or image") }} where the type is optional.
  If you add these into page layouts, it will auto-create the blocks for you in Page Manager allowing both designers & admins to manage the content itself without the risk of breaking the design.
  Admin > Edit Page > Content Block editors found in the layout templates will automatically be displayed within Page Manager in the same sequence that they appear on the web page.  
  Also, you can pass unique=true to have the block be different between each page it's used on.
  You can also manage all blocks over in Admin > Content Blocks.
• Auto page layouts
  When designing up different html layouts for pages, you can now name the layouts so that they automatically apply to a page without needing to set it. 
  Admin > Edit Page > Auto assign layouts to pages based on "_slug_here.html.twig" in the html/layouts/ folder.

Improvements

• Content sliders > you can now tick to remove the image associated with a slide without needing to upload a new one.
  Under slider panel images it now shows a "Remove image?" option.
• "Users making purchases" report improved to support Manufacturer/Brand & Order State. 
  This allows you to find users that abanded carts of specific types of items) 
  Reports > Users making purchases > Manufacturer & Order State
• New icon template function for use when CKEditor removes your icons.
  If a page content has template syntax enabled you can now bring in FontAwesome icons, e.g. {{ rec_icon('pencil') }}
• We now block Google & other search engines crawling too many subpages of site search results. 
  This helps avoid issues where no results were found but Google crawled the many pages of featured products thinking these were part of the same result set. 
• New switch to re-enable the "confirm complete" option to users
  We've now disabled the confirm complete option by default, preventing users from selecting this and changing the order status themselves.
  If you'd like to use this you can re-enable it in:
  Site Settings > Ecommerce > Users Previous Orders Screen > Allow users to set confirmed complete on orders (defaults to off)
• Also you can now prevent users from selecting Return Required on their previous order
  Site Settings > Ecommerce > Users Previous Orders Screen > Allow users to set return required on orders (defaults to on)
• Admin > Edit Page > SEO Report
  Now moved from under page content, to the top of the edit page screen to give it more focus.
• Improved health checks to detect problem orders
  Progressively we've been introducing proactive health checks into the system to spot issues that could affect data or monitor that fixes have cured problems, especially useful for those which are not readily reproducible. 
  Should issues ever arise on your site, we'll reach out and advise of any action you need to take.

Experimental

• We're experimenting with allowing sandboxed PHP in templates, allowing designers & developers increased flexibility within templates. 
  Ultimately our aim is to allow contributions to REC+ for 3rd party extensions such as new admin areas and workflows that are more custom to the specific site. 
  This feature is not ready for production yet but contact us if you're interested in trialling this on a dev site. 

Content blocks let you as a designer dictate editable areas on pages back to admins.
Mixed with the new auto layout files feature they make the workflow of creating pages much simpler.
In this video, we'll show a workflow for designing custom page layouts with multiple editable areas.