New in REC+: Web Notifications, Stripe Checkout, Quickshop, Content Block improvements & more.
Stand out features
- Web Notifications on desktop & mobile for new form replies & orders.
You can now optionally receive instant desktop or mobile notifications for new form replies & orders on your site as first class device notifications.
To do this, on the device you want to receive the notificiations, login to the REC+ admin centre and under the notifications icon on the header navigation you can tick to enable notications. The browser will then ask you to confirm this and after this you should start to receive notifications on your device as soon as new forms are filled out or orders are received (for online retailers).
You can manage your connected devices and notifications in the edit user area of your account under a new devices tab. - Stripe Checkout added giving you Google Pay & Apple Pay options plus cards
We've integrated the Stripe Checkout payment processor, allowing payment by cards, Google Pay & Apple Pay payments on devices that support this.
Go to setup instructions - Quickshop for faster ordering
Quickshop allows buyers to speed up their ordering with product code lookup and add to cart. Perfect for B2B clients or regular bulk buyers. Here's an example of this in action:
CMS
- Easier content creation with repeatable & feature content blocks
A new range of content block features have rolled out, along with with recipes for quickly building up new content layouts which can be easily edited within Page Manager once the content block has been set up. For example, displaying your team members on an About page.
View examples and developer information on our new page - Page Manager tabs for navigation / Creating custom page menus with rec_menu()
Page Manager now has simple tabs to see pages which appear in each type of menu navigation (i.e. header, footer, etc.), as well as allowing you to create your own menus. You can use these custom menus on the front end with the rec_menu() function, or you can use them to help categorise pages in the admin area. - Easier to view/edit Content Blocks and Forms on pages in Page Manager
The content flow in Page Manager has been improved when editing a page so that as well as content blocks it shows forms that are present on the page, with a button present to edit the form. This uses the pre-existing rec_form() function in layouts.
Additionally for front end developers when designing the page content you can use effectively this function as a placeholder for a future form that hasn't yet been built and then afterwards add the form via Page Manager when editing the page using the Add Form button that will appear.
Ecommerce
- Fresh new payment processor images and recommended methods.
The payment processor images have been updated to a more modern design.
the admin payment processors area has also had a refresh to help point out old/deprecated payment methods and the ones we now recommend using such as Stripe (which supports Apple Pay and Google Pay) & PayPal Express.
- 'Movers & Shakers' - Top Products & Top Brand/Category Report can now sort on Revenue Change
These reports can now be sorted by Revenue Change % compared to the same period on the previous years so you can see your Movers (% from high-low) and Shakers (% from low-high) by product, category or brand.
Reports > Top Products Report / Top Brands / Category Report > sort by "Revenue Change % high-low' or 'low-high'. - Product filter improvements
Design improvements to long lists of filters or categories to clean up the design of this area.
Filter tags in the sidebar app now show in Title Case.
Header / site search can now tie into the filters by adding a search block and showing the filters on the shop layout page.
Compatibility improvements between the instant load and infinite scroll functions. - Free delivery indicators show against order items in admin
When viewing orders in admin, items with free delivery will be marked so you can better tell why delivery charges on orders are different to what you would otherwise expect if free delivery didn't apply. - Setting to sort items by code in admin orders & invoices
You can now force sorting of order items in the admin area by product code (options also sort by name) to help the readability of these screens and making picking through items faster.
Admin > Settings > "Sort items in Admin order views & invoices by product code" - Template order update emails & invoice link as a variable.
Order update emails now run full template syntax & allows use of the variable {{ invoice.link }} for sending the user direct to the invoice. - Guest checkout - hide delivery address
The existing "Hide delivery address if it's the same as the billing on Checkout" setting now extends to the guest checkout registration.
This lets you visually hide the delivery address entry until users tick that they'd like to enter a different address and makes the screen look simpler to aid conversion optimisation. - Standard option recursive updates now apply against matching group/name/code
This makes the mass updates of options much easier, you can even add new standard options that match the group/name/code of existing options, to then change it and have these changes apply back to the existing ones. - Minor cart improvements:
The paypal & proceed to checkout buttons now only appear when items are actually in the cart
Non js cart buttons now adapt when still in a JS browser enviroment.
New live reloadable classes available for the cart template for "cart-subtotal-vat", "cart-subtotal-price-ex-vat" & "cart-subtotal-price-inc-vat" - Price Manager - Changes Under Consideration.
We are re-thinking the flow within Price Manager to make it simpler to understand and safer, with live previews via spreadsheets before changes are applied. This would move it more into line with the way prices are handled in accounting systems like Sage.
- New in Email Manager - Send "non-marketing" emails to all users irrespective of subscription status
Under GDPR, you have to have consent to send marketing emails to people and Email Manager would therefore not send email to any unsubscribed users because it was primarily intended for sending marketing emails. However, you may be sending email to customers under legitimate interests such as important service or company updates in which case it will need to go to all users whether unsubscribed or not. To allow this, you can now mark your email as non-marketing and have it send to users regardless of subscribed status.
Email Manager > Write Email > "4. Additional settings" > "Mark as "Non-marketing" to send to non-subscribed users as well" - EU Mailgun support
Mailgun now offer EU servers so when integrating inside Mailgun you can choose to have your emails sent from EU instead of US servers.
You'll then need to change this in Admin > SMTP > Mailgun API config > Region/Endpoint - Notification emails to admins when users subscribe or unsubscribe now contain more detail
The membership code & business name is now included on these emails by default to help with subscriptions managed at a business level.
These notifications are optional as configured in Site Settings.
Admin
- Bandwidth stats
A graph of your site's bandwidth usage is now available to you in Admin > Bandwidth Usage.
Behind the scenes
- JS Code Assurance.
We've been working on new static analysis tools to check sites for Javascript compatibility issues across the major browsers and on older versions such as IE11. This now lets us automatically check the core code for possible issues when deploying new releases. We're looking to take this code and make it available to all sites in time. Stay tuned for more information on this to help building new JS on the sites. - Redirect issues with Chrome and admin sessions fixed.
New versions of Chrome hide the www prefix which lead to an issue where if you clicked the url bar in the admin area and pressed enter to reload the page you could end up back on the login page due to cookie/redirect issues. This has now been resolved.
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