Welcome to our new blog on REC+

To read all prior REC+ releases going back over 5 years, please visit our knowldege centre 

CHANGES IN BRIEF

Available 1st November 2017

A number of small changes have been introduced in ecommerce with product re-ordering and the Google product feed, a "form fade" effect when forms are completed plus making it easier to enter an ID for a user to identify them in your accounts system.

Read all about the changes on Freshdesk

REMINDER TO REC USERS

Remember to upgrade to REC+ to access all features, while the upgrade is currently free. You do this in admin by clicking the link to upgrade to REC+ in the top left hand side of the admin screen.

NB Separate charges may apply when using extra modules such as bulk email and Prospect Manager.

STILL TO MIGRATE TO HTTPS?

We strongly recommend that you migrate to HTTPS. See our previous post for full details.

We have introduced a new Invite system, helpful management reports on pages and products and extended the session cookie.  

Read full details and setup instructions on freshdesk

Invite System

The Invite system can be used to send out emails to invite people to use your site. This allows them to accept the invite and set up their own password.

Top Pages Report

This displays the top 100 most viewed pages on your website.

Top Products Report

View your top 500 most popular selling products with the facility to select by specific categories or brands. 

Top Manufacturers (aka Brands) / Top Categories Report

View sales grouped by manufacturer / brand to see which brands are most popular, or by category for your most popular categories.

Revenue Sources & Form Responses

Available for marketing clients to view the different sources driving revenues or replies to your forms, directing you to the detailed information on the Marketing Console.

Session Cookie Change 

We have changed the session cookie so that users can now see their incomplete shopping cart baskets for up to 30 days after they have closed the browser. This will help to increase conversion rates for returning users who abandoned the shopping process and can still see the products in their baskets when opening a new session.

Read full details and setup instructions on freshdesk.

These new features are available in REC+, remember to click on the top right link in the header to upgrade for free currently. Charges will apply in the future!

VIEW VISITOR ACTIVITY IN PAGE MANAGER 

You can now see a 30-day activity graphline in Page Manager against individual pages so you can see which pages are being viewed the most, with the exact visitor numbers appearing when you hover over the graphline. This data appears when you have connected your website to your Google Analytics account. This is useful to see at-a-glance where you have the most activity and any spikes in visitor traffic across your site.

REMINDER TO REC USERS

Remember to upgrade to REC+ to access all features, while the upgrade is currently free. You do this in admin by clicking the link to upgrade to REC+ in the top left hand side of the admin screen.

NB Separate charges may apply when using extra modules such as bulk email and Prospect Manager.

STILL TO MIGRATE TO HTTPS?

We strongly recommend that you migrate to HTTPS. See our previous post for full details.

We have introduced a number of enhancements including Weekly Tips to help admins with your conversion optimisation program, being able to email by user tags so you can precisely segment who receives your campaigns and you can now connect to Google Tag Manager to make it easier to insert 3rd party tracking code. In ecommerce, you can add meta data on Manufacturer records for improved SEO and Order Manager has improved sorting to complement the recent release of 30-day session cookies. There's a minor tweak in Download Manager to allow you to drag and drop the download file in without needing to click to upload it.  For Prospect Manager users, we have now made it easier to roll forward a reminder with some pre-set links to add an hour, a day etc, plus you can now create a prospect directly from a form created in Forms & Processes. There's also a small feature to disable a dropdown option temporarily on a form by adding a '-' in front of the drop down text. These enhancements are available on either 26th or 30th January. 

Available Tuesday 6th February 2018

You now have the ability to enter an email signature on admin user records (in this case you'd be using it for sales agents) and have this displayed within the emails you send via Prospect Manager by adding in the tag {{ email_signature }} to the "email quote" system page.

Membership number (often renamed to Account ID via site defines) now appears on the main user record and prospect activity record which saves having to look it up. 

The "value" field displayed in the email message will be suppressed if the value is zero (tip: remember to remove the preceding text which is normally just the word 'Value".

We are excited to announce the release of Version 7 and the Module system which is now available to REC+ users. This brings a new method of creating and displaying custom content and optionally displaying the data on web pages with full design control for web developers. In this way you can use a single design style to create unique pages with their own URL's and content plus tagging and filtering, all populated from a database table you define yourself.

On the fun end, you can create polls and make better looking team pages. Or maybe you want to publish web pages containing detailed recipes, technical FAQ's with lots of data fields, case studies or knowledge articles - all nicely styled the way you want. You could also store your business data in the site which only admins can view and edit, such as audit reports, project tasks, approved supplier lists, purchase authorisations and more. 

We have provided documentation on Freshdesk on how it works. Due to the bespoke nature of custom content, all implementation, support and training is chargeable time.

Applies To: Ecommerce Sites Taking Standard Paypal Payments Through The Checkout Process
Does Not Apply To: Paypal Encrypted and Paypal Express methods, or Form payments

We have recently received a few reports where a small number of users paying via the standard Paypal method have had an issue completing the payment process. This does not apply to your site if you instead use the Paypal Encrypted and Paypal Express payment methods, or you are taking payments via a form rather then the normal checkout process.

This is a small, random problem which we cannot recreate and Paypal cannot offer an explanation why it has occasionally occurred. We therefore recommend you consider moving to Paypal Express which has not had any reported issues and also offers a much smoother and faster checkout process for the user as an added benefit.

How Do I Know If I Am On Standard Paypal Payments?

Go into Payment Processors Manager and see if "Paypal Or Credit Cards" is set to a Status of "on" and Mode of "live". If it is then we recommend you migrate to Paypal Express. 

How Do I Update To Paypal Express Checkout?

Follow this article on Freshdesk

Test!

Make sure you test your changes by successfully putting an order though the checkout process using the Express Checkout method you have set up.

We have been working hard to ensure the REC platform complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which comes into force on 25th May 2018. This is a heads up about the changes we will be releasing next Tuesday 24th April which will enable you to take many of the necessary steps to ensure you are compliant.

New Cookie Message

A newly-worded cookie message and layout will be displayed to first-time visitors in place of the existing message. The new message will inherit the colour schemes of your site if you have adapted it.

New Cookie Pop-up (for responsive design websites)

When the Cookie Settings link is cliked it will fire up a modal window giving the visitor the ability to manage which cookies they wish to allow, as required under GDPR. A version of this will be made available for non-responsive websites at a later date. 

Positive Opt-in Consent For Newsletters / Email Campaigns

The system will cater for positive opt-in consent to newsletters where the individual will have to tick a box to be added as a newsletter subscriber, rather than it being pre-ticked for them.

Re-permissioning For Email Campaigns

A re-permissioning process has been defined to include a program for bulk unsubscribes and a new "Subscribe" field which can be added to email templates to allow people to opt-in to future marketing emails.

Form Data Collection Tips

This enables you to add some explainer text on form fields to explain why you wish to collect that particular data. 

Users Can See Their Form Submissions

Users will be able to see what forms they submitted on your site when they log in to their User Home page.

Additional Auditing

The audit log will keep a record of when users are added to the system and when there are changes to their newsletter subscription, status, level and group. This will help administrators to see what has happened historically as part of complying with individuals' rights to restrict processing or to be forgotten.

What Will You Have To Do?

We will be providing guidance on the steps you need to take to use these new features when the release is made available next week.

There will be further releases before the 25th May which are more targeted towards alerts and notifications when administrators access private data. This is part of extending the perimeter for data breach detection because many data breaches originate from inside a company rather than being external website hacks.

The checkout process has been updated to enhance the user experience on the checkout page and the code has been generally improved. 

This is a notification that the change comes into effect on Wednesday 25th April 2018.

GDPR Is Now Live!

Find out what you need to know to set up and implement the changes required to make your website GDPR compliant before 25th May 2018.

Features added on 22nd May include making Cookie Manager available to non-responsive design sites and allowing the Subscribe link to work with Mailgun integration and showing 3rd party domains correctly in the non-essential section of the cookie pop-up. All users are being asked to sign our latest terms and conditions which include GDPR updates mainly in the form of the new Data Processing Agreement.

Read all features and how to implement them here

You also have access to our full GDPR section which includes how to run processes that help you comply.

Do You Need Help WIth Your GDPR Website Compliance?

We are helping users to achieve compliance on their websites by performing cookie audits, form reviews and updates to cookie and privacy notices. These typically take around 3 hours and are charged at £75+VAT per hour or part thereof. Book your site in for GDPR via a freshdesk ticket.

Filter Users By Subscriber allows you to select your users in User Manager > Filter Users by whether or not they have subscribed to your newsletters. You can then assign selected users into specific user groups (1,2,3 refer to the groups shown on a user record) which you may want to do for segmentation and emailing purposes. NB Email Manager will not send to users who are not marked as subscribed.

Filter Users who are ungrouped allows you to find users who have been entered without being assigned into a group, so you can quickly identify them and then add them into the desired group.

Script Finder is a new program which allows you to scan areas of the website to find scripts that have been embedded in the site, such as 3rd party apps or tracking which may introduce cookies and therefore you need to be able to turn off those scripts in conjunction with Cookie Manager.

View this article in full on freshdesk

Combating Form Spam. There has been a recent sharp increase in spam, some of which is by-passing Google Captcha, in particular from Russia. We have introduced our new Intelligent Spam Filter to help combat this. In the most obvious spam cases, when the spammer has wasted their time submitting the form we will automatically reject it without their knowledge. For other possible spam items, we will place them in the spam folder of the corresponding form in Forms & Processes.

Google Products Variation Manager. This has been renamed from 'Multi Ad Generator' and you can export your product feed data to a CSV file, modify it with any alterations you need, then import it via the Import System, selecting Google Products GTINs in step 2. The reason this change was introduced was to help the situation where products are set up with multiple options and each one needs its own GTIN (in this case for clothing that had a GTIN for each size/colour combination). 

REC+ Version Numbering. Because we are rolling out continuous product updates we will no longer be displaying version numbers in REC+. Our team works on the software every day of the week keeping it up to date with security updates, software patches and enhacements. The updates are automatically rolled out overnight to all sites, meaning your software is always on the very latest version available. NB If you are an REC user then remember to switch to REC+ for free currently in your admin console!

Under GDPR registered users can object to having their data processed. In REC+ this means restricting processing via Email Manager (so the user won't be included on emails) and in User Manager and Prospect Manager a red warning message is displayed when you select the user advising:

"Restricted User
This user has been restricted from processing under GDPR, please do not contact them or process their data."

To mark a user as restricted go into User Manager > select their user record > Status & Levels tab > tick the field 'Restricted User'.

In this issue of REC developments we have a number of fantastic new features to help run your website, let's take a look:

In this weeks issue we focus on smaller day to day improvements, let's dive in:

Highlights

• PDF downloads for Invoices.
  You can now download order invoices directly from order manager as PDFs.
  Available in Order Manager > Orders > "PDF Invoice" button under the summary details.
  This uses the design of your print invoice which is also available to customise in Templates > select the active template > html/invoice/base.html.twig
• Further order manager improvements.
  Continuing from last week we've made further improvements to the flow of the new order management screen based on the feedback we've had so far from you. If you've switched to the old version, please consider trialing the new order experience again to see the latest changes. Your feedback is always welcome. 
• Mobile touch icon.
  On mobile devices this is shown when adding to favorites, bookmarks & adding to the home screen (similar to favicons). 
  We automatically create scaled down versions of your mobile touch icon for the most popular different mobile browsers. 
  Available in Site Settings > Company > Company Details > Mobile Touch Icon.
  Recommended size: at least 200x200px & must be a square image.
• Social Sharing Image.
  Ever shared your site and wondered why Facebook / Twitter / Instagram used a specific image? This change let's you have more control over this by setting a default image for sharing. This image applies to all main pages of your site, while blog & product pages still use their main images by default. 
  Available in Site Settings > Company > Company Details > Social Sharing Image
  Recommended size: 600x315px or 1200x630px.
  You can test with Facebook's Sharing Debugger tool.

Tweaks & Improvements

• Rename delivery countries 
  Though you can rename countries in the system already, this would lead to issues with existing data in the system.
  An example of this would be renaming UK to UK Mainland to seperate out Islands for delivery rules.
  To resolve this, we've added a new "Country display name" feature to delivery regions letting you set a different name for countries to appear as. 
  When setting this, please make sure you set all the relevant regions for that country. 
  Available in Delivery Manager > View Delivery Regions > Edit delivery methods, set "Country Display Name".
• Form sign up process now supports updating existing users
  Previously the sign up process on forms would only subscribe new users, and if a user had unsubscribed they'd need to resubscribe from their account page.
  Now existing users who have unsubscribed can resubscribe on sign up forms easily through the form they originally subscribed through. 
• Email deliverability improvements.
  Continuing our work to prevent emails going to spam, we've made further changes to the FROM addresses we use on all admin notifications.
  Follow the full guide on better email deliverability & troubleshooting here.
• HTTPS additional domain redirects
  Multiple domains pointed at a single IP doesn't work with HTTPS, but you can redirect to the main domain from these additional domains. 
  Previously this meant also setting up HTTPS for the other domain due to how the HTTPS connections happen prior to redirects.  
  We've now introduced a way to have HTTPS enabled redirects setup for any addition domains you might have that you want redirected to your main site.
  Please contact us if you need one of these enabled for your site with the domain name(s) you'd like to have redirected.  
• Facebook Analytics.
  Similar to Google Analytics, Facebook offer their own form of analytics.
  Available in Connect > Social > Facebook Analytics, app id can be set here and then you can enable the js tracking too.
  You can set this up in Facebook:
  https://developers.facebook.com/apps/ > "+ Add a New App", setting the name to your domain name & any contact email.
  App ID given at the top of the screen, click to copy it and paste over in REC > Connect > Social > Facebook Insights APP ID.
  Under "Analytics" click "Set Up", then click "Web".
  Click "I already set up the Javascript SDK" & skip adding the code as REC handles this for you.
  Enter your Site URL, click Save & then Continue, then skip through the remaining steps by clicking Next on each screen.
  Last screen leaves you on there so now you can click to view your Analytics.

Designers & Developers

• Users API can now accept delivery prices with or without VAT set
  You can set custom delivery prices (when enabled) on user records & the API can now handle this with a way to set if you're passing a VAT / non-VAT price.
  In the Users API, you can send the following against each user: "delivery_charges": {  "default": "", "free_threshold": "" },
  we assume VAT prices by default but pass the "use_non_vat_prices" URL param.
• WebP & SVG images support.
  We now support images throughout the system for Google's WebP image format & as SVG.
  With SVG please optimize the images before uploading them to the site & when using WebP please be mindful of browser support as this is a new format. 
  Available throughout the system such as product/blog images as well as logos and all other image uploads.
• Mailchimp Upgrade.
  Keeping up with the latest Mailchimp upgrade, all users should be able to be synced once again.
• SMTP email debugging.
  If you're having issues sending emails through SMTP you can get full debug logs.
  This new area is available at the bottom of SMTP Settings section in Admin.

With Black Friday fast approaching, in this week's issue we've introduced a useful new feature to help boost your sales, as well as other tweaks and improvements to the system and some helpful hints: 

Highlights

• Coupons can now trigger FREE DELIVERY!
  With Black Friday on the horizon, you can now offer free delivery to customers with this new type of coupon.
  You can narrow it down to just a specific delivery zone such as UK only & gain all the normal coupon controls over this including date ranges, maximum number of uses & more.
  Available in Coupon Manager > add/edit Coupon > under "How much is this coupon worth?" it now gives the a tickbox option against the question: "Or do you want this coupon to trigger Free Delivery?".
• Stress testing REC+
  With big sales come big traffic spikes! We've been working with load testing tools more lately to stress test REC+ to it's limits to identify and optimise areas that could be affected by extremely large volumes of traffic. A deep dive article will follow on this soon. This is all part of ongoing improvements and monitoring of the core infrastructure and REC+ application performance.

Tweaks & Improvements

• Improvements to email delivery
  Further improvements have been made so Sender & Return-Path addresses can always be the system address, which you can also now override. 
  This lets you be receive form reply emails from the visitors email, even through the sender address behind the scenes is actually still the system, which then prevents any SPF issues. 
• Further improvements to order manager
  We have been delighted to introduce further improvements to Order Manager, after receiving a lot of useful feedback from you. Thanks.

Did you know...

• Email marketing reports
  A somewhat hidden away feature of our Email manager system is reports on not only who read & clicked the emails, but also how many form replies & orders came from the campaign. 
  You can find these in Email Manager > View Sent Emails > Click the email you'd like to see > Check out the Ecommerce & Form Responses tabs.
• Coupon usage reports
  From inside coupon manager you can click the Report link between Edit & Delete to find a detailed report of orders that used the coupon, top products it was used on and more. 
• & more useful reports!
  Remember there are a number of helpful reports to assist you in measuring the success of your Black Friday campaigns, as well as planning which products & categories to run offers on. These include: Top Products Report, Top Brand/Category Report, Top Pages Report & your Revenue Sources report.
  Available in the Reports system in Admin.

Black Friday Offer if you require Local Marketing

Last week we had the Chrome Developer Summit, check out our rundown of the most important features here & let's dive into what's new in REC:

Highlights

• Ability to hide the checkout delivery address if it's the same as the billing address:
  On the checkout confirm screen you can have the delivery address hidden if it's the same as the billing address.
  This is an optional display change you can use to help clean up the layout of the checkout. 
  Available in Settings > Ecommerce > Checkout > "Hide delivery address if it's the same as the billing on Checkout"
• Twitter cards large image support:
  Similar to the social share image Facebook & other social networks use, Twitter also support sending them a larger version of the image to be used when a link to your site is shared.
  Available in Settings > Company > Site Images > Twitter Cards > "Enable Twitter Cards" switch & "Twitter Card Large Image" uploader.
• Paypal express 'in context' buttons are now automatically tracked in Google Analytics
  Monitoring the effectiveness of buttons on your site is important and you can now automatically monitor which of your paypal buttons are clicked under Events > PayPal Buttons in Google Analytics. 
• Addon products
  If you have products such as setup charges or similar services that you don't want showing up in best seller, latest products & other lists & you don't want them to show in the abandonment emails then this new setting can help.
  Available in: Add product > Extra > Is this an addon product? As well as on: Edit product > Prices & delivery tab > Is this an addon product?
• Form replies source/medium tracking.
  You can now track which sources bring in the most form replies in the Form
  Available in Forms & Processes > View form replies > new Medium/Source column & there's a new Medium & Source columns in the CSV
• Form replies improvements
  In response to your feedback we've made a few useful improvements to the Form replies area including moving the export to the top so you can get to the data faster as well as making replies now sorted by newest first instead of by unread.
• Users API improvements
  The users API events for updates now include unsubscribes as well as supporting the GDPR "is_restricted_user" field in user api responses.

Security Improvements

• SRI on CDN scripts
  SubResource Integrity provides a little extra protection when we reference scripts on 3rd party sites.
  This now covers all the default CDN js files we use so that if ever they were hacked and the hacker poisoned these files, the integrity check would instead request a trustworthy local version of the file instead.
  Using this method, the site still functions without using the CDN & the user is still safe.  
• Secure & SameSite Cookies experiment
  Secure cookies make sure that they are only loaded over HTTPS, while SameSite cookies make sure they are only used when in the context of this site, adding an additional level of protection to the session cookies used on your site. 
  Available in Settings > Security > "Use Secure & SameSite Cookies - Experimental!"

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. 

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!

A Happy New Year to all our customers and a prosperous 2019!

As always, the team at Wildfire will be working diligently to improve and enhance REC+ functionality, security and performance this year and will continue to keep you posted of new features via our Updates blog page.

Getting the essentials right in 2019

Here's some of our perennial recommendations for your site to ensure you start the New Year off on a good footing:

• Ensure your site works well on mobile devices (contact Areca Design on 01386 570360 if you want to go mobile or are looking for a refresh)
  
• Run your site under HTTPS for secure transmission of data over the internet (and get a slight SEO reward from Google)
• Comply with the GDPR (we have helped a number of clients achieve this so contact us to book yourself in)
• Commit to ongoing conversion optimisation (see tips for online retailers) and better tracking and management reporting (tips for all sites)

Need help getting more business?

We can assist you in making improvements via our Marketing specialists, as well as running digital marketing campaigns, simply contact your account manager for more information and pricing. This includes services for ecommerce product marketing and promoting local services.

Stop Press: The Russians are at it again...

We fight an ongoing battle to stop spam getting through to your site contact forms including registration and logins. A significant volume has been coming from Russian email addresses and we have acted throughout 2018 to widen spam protection against new methods deployed by the spammers. We are now going even further and employing new systems to counter this using large scale services from Stop Forum Spam and Akisnet. Hopefully this will help keep spam to a minimum.

Best wishes and a prosperous 2019!

Happy New Year from the REC+ team! This latest issue of New in REC+ has a range of new features that rolled out over the holiday period. 

Highlights

• User tags can now be renamed & nested tags are now supported via the " > " separator. 
  Useful if you have a large number of tags in a tag group & want to give them a more fine grained hierarchical structure. 
  Check this out in Admin > User Tags.
• Quick add user within Prospect Manager
  Now when adding a prospect you can quickly add the user at the same time to streamline this process. 
• Delivery services integration via Postmen.com  (beta)
  With Postmen you can use a wide range of delivery services such as FedEx or DPD to get their live calculated  delivery rates for orders during checkout.
  We'll be talking about this more soon in an upcoming post when it's out of beta. 

Improvements

• Product code now included in enquiry emails
  This should be already working for you, but may require a change to the html/store/product_info/enquire_form.html.twig if this has been previously overridden. 
• You can now switch displays of the user ID in admin to show their membership code instead.
  Useful for avoiding any confusion between Membership codes and user IDs for sites who prefer using the membership codes.
  Site Settings > Display > Show Membership Code instead of User ID
• Order Items in the Order Confirmation Email is now templatable
  This allows you greater control over the emails that go out to your users & how items are listed in these emails.
  The new template file is available in: /html/email/order_details.html.twig
• Form messages marked as spam now record the reason we marked them as spam. 
  Possible reasons include: blocked / Russian spam addresses, common spam message phrases & more. 
  Admin > Form Builder > Form Replies > View Spam Folder > New column showing "Spam Reason"
• Checkout & PayPal warnings now display better to users & are fully logged on the order history.
  More descriptive warnings are now given to users if PayPal declines payment. 
  If a customer has any warning shown to them at checkout, this will now be shown in the order history.

Developer

• Clear the cart fast in JS with REC.Cart.emptyCart()
  This allows you to programmatically refresh the cart, useful in custom add-to-cart processes to start a new cart. 

Behind the scenes

• New security improvements
  Fixes & improvements continue to be automatically rolled out to all our sites each night. 
• Admin side CDN fallbacks
  We use a CDN for many assets in the admin side to speed up this area, however over the holiday period the CDN we use for some assets in the admin side had some downtime, causing a couple areas in Admin to not function. 
  This new release allows us to circumvent the CDN if it is down and the admin area will continue to work without interruption. 

Our latest issue of New in REC+ brings several new spam blocking improvements & new region-based tax settings to handle US Economic Nexus rules. Lets dive right in.

Highlights

• Akismet, the powerhouse spam blocker, has now been rolled out greatly improving our blocking of spam form responses to your site. Whilst this is a paid service, we have included it for free in your regular subscription.
  No settings required, this is now live on all sites.
• Region-based VAT rules, helping support US Economic Nexus laws
  You can now set individual tax rates on regions, rather than using the main tax rate in site settsings, which then applies to users in that region. This helps towards meeting the new tax laws introduced in the US. For full compliance in this complex area, contact us about using TaxJar integration.
  New VAT region rules can be enabled in: Site Settings > Prices & VAT > VAT Rates "Use region based VAT rates?"
  Go to Delivery Manager > View Delivery Region > find the region to change > Edit 
  Tick " Is this region within your VAT-able zone?"
  Set the tax rate for the region in "Override VAT Rates?" > VAT Rate field
  NB This currently calculates whether to use Billing or Delivery address based on the setting in "Calculate VAT based on Delivery Address rather than Billing Address". If you wish to apply a mix of Nexus rules using delivery AND billing addresses, please contact us.
• Require region select now allows multiple countries
  Sometimes users forget to select their region/county/state in their billing or delivery countries which can lead to incorrect delivery rates. With this new improvement you can now require users, in any of the selected countries, to select their region. 
  Available in: Settings > General > "Force Users to Select a County for a Specific Countries" now supports selecting multiple countries.

Improvements

• Product code search now available in the Users Making Purchases report
  Looking to see users buying or thinking about buying high value items, you can now search for multiple product codes (comma separated) when generating the users making purchases report.
  Use Case: You could use this to see which users were interested in certain products (e.g. high value products, new additions to a range, products on offer) but didn't complete the purchase (select an Order State of 'abandoned') and then you can follow this up with them.
  Available in: Admin > Reports > Users Making Purchases > Product Code(s)
• You can now switch displays of the user ID in admin to show their membership code instead.
  Set this in SIte Settings > General > Show Membership Code instead of User ID 
• Health checks expanded
  We've expanded our internal health checks to make sure all sites have important core settings in place such as correct email & language settings.

Developer

• Ckeditor no longer removes blank "span" and "i" elements (e.g. allows use of FontAwesome icons)
  This allows you to enter more custom html such as FontAwesome icons, without ckeditor removing/cleaning these away.
• Content Blocks now support template content by passing a template=true flag
  Continuing to improve our new content blocks feature, as a designer you can now reference template tags for variables etc direct from inside your content blocks. Adding to the flexibility that content blocks offer.

In this week's issue of New in REC+, we highlight the extra anti-spam layers we have introduced for combating spam bots leaving comments on forms, which has been spreading to registration, login & search forms. We have also made other improvements including adding Stripe for form payments and improving the login and re-ordering processes.

Anti-spam actions

To recap, we previously introducing Akismet's filtering system on all sites and extended our own internal blocking techniques to stop spam comments being left. We have now gone a step further by introducing the StopForumSpam.com service to identify and block known bad actors from submitting spam.

• StopForumSpam integration
  Forms & user registrations now use the StopForumSpam.com service to help protect against known bad email & IP addresses of spammers by blocking their submissions. NB This is currently in trial and currently set to disabled by default. Once the trial has completed it will be enabled by default on all sites
  This is accessed in Admin > Connect > Utilities > StopForumSpam > Enable StopForumSpam on registrations
• Rate limiting improvements
  The login, register, forgot password & search programs have been redesigned so our our rate limit system more extensively block bots after a number of attempts within certain timeframes. 
• Preventing spam from being part of your mailing lists
  Our subscriber system will now block known email TLD's (top level domains) with a high probability of being fake from polluting your subscriber lists, for example submissions from .ru domains.

Payments

• Stripe payments on forms
  You can now take Stripe payments via forms built in Form Builder. This adds to the existing PayPal Express method that is already available.
  Set this up in: Admin > Connect > Payment Processors > Stripe
  (add public & secret key from Stripe here, found in your stripe account > developer > api keys) 
  In Form Builder > Edit Form > Form payment method & Form payment mode. 
  For GDPR - Enable the Stripe Cookies & *.stripe.com domain in Cookie Manager

Process Improvements

• Customer reorder confirmation
  When a user is repeat ordering via their user account, they will now be warned if they try to exit before completing the re-ordering process, which stops them losing their cart unintentionally.
• Login refactoring
  We've spent a good amount of time recently reworking the login process behind the scenes to be simpler, more consistent & give better warnings back to users if there is an issue with their login attempt. It also now handles further edge cases where users switch cart sessions between mobile & desktop during the ordering process.