Over the last quarter (as always) we've deployed many improvements and new features within the IASP 5.0 Content Management System designed to make website administration easier. Some of the major improvements are:
IASP Shopping Cart Control Panel
For clients using our Advanced Shopping Cart, the new IASP Shopping Cart Control Panel gives you centralised access to view and manage a huge amount of information and settings related to Administration of your online shopping cart system.
As well as managing the sales generated by your website (including order history and export) you now have one-stop access to a virtually unlimited array of options to personalise and streamline the online shopping experience.
This new feature helps you manage:
-
Advanced Shipping Control - shipping rulesets and
profiles; control cost, behaviour, required lead-times, etc.
-
Taxation Rules - excluding certain products from GST,
calculating or applying overseas tax.
- Adjustments - discounts and surcharges based on location, quantity, price, payment method, referring affilliate* (e.g. Credit Card Surcharges, Promotional Discounts)
-
Payment - what methods can be used to pay, and when?
(e.g. allow Credit Card for Australia/US/UK customers ONLY, disallow
American Express for orders under $500).
Advanced Inventory Control and Sales History Management tools are currently in development and will be available soon.
* Affiliate rule conditions are only valid for customers subscribed to the IASP Advanced Affiliate System.
Integrated Virtual File System
While the IASP CMS has had Automated Image Processing since 2004, traditionally there have been some limitations in the linkage between content and images as the image data was held in an external application.
Over the Easter Weekend we rolled out a significant upgrade to the Image Processing system, which relocated all this data and integrated the features into the CMS itself; the result is the new Virtual File System, found in your Control Panel.
The true benefits of this upgrade will emerge over time as customisable watermarking, image tagging and a number of other planned or in-development features come online. The upgrade also means that it's no longer limited to just handling images; documents such as PDF or Word files can be uploaded into the system alongside images, allowing for linking from the Content Editor.
Security Enhancements
A number of our customers have recently been trialling a new Security module in the Control Panel. This module adds:
- The ability to lock down administrator access to a fixed list of IP Addresses only (please contact us if you are using a static IP address and would like this feature enabled now).
- Extensive access to security auditing information (failed logins, malware attacks, virus and worm traffic).
We are also in discussions with a number of Anti Virus vendors in regard to virus protection on uploaded files (at present uploaded virus infected files are deleted with no notice to the uploader). The extension to this we envisage will inform users uploading infected files (for example Word Documents with Macro Viruses -- essentially the only virus infected files that are currently an issue) that their upload was infected and that they should scan their computer for further infections. Auditing information from this will also feed into the Security Panel (as it currently does for attempted break-ins and worm traffic) for further Administrator action if required.
We expect these features to go live in the next few weeks; if you'd like to be part of the testing program for the Security Panel please raise a support ticket or give us a call.
Improvements to image and file uploading
Many of you would have noticed that for automated image fields, we've recently replaced the simple 'upload' tool with a more functional Choose OR Upload tool, allowing you to pick from already uploaded images rather than uploading an image you want to reuse once for each place you use it.
This means that you can upload a logo, for example, once via the Control Panel, then use the 'Choose an Image' tool to pick it on each page you want it to appear.
If you have a lot of double-ups in your Virtual File System and would like help in reducing them using this new tool, please drop us a line.
Coming Soon
Stay tuned for the following imminent upgrades:
- Extended Messenger Capabilities - the interface for Messenger has just had a serious spruce-up, and the features are about to be extended too. Further updates will follow.
- Improved Client Account Management - we're nearly ready to launch a new Account Management system for our clients on this very site -- where you can keep track of progress of current projects or minor works, support tickets submitted by all your staff, your billing history, and more.
As always, feedback, suggestions, or comments are welcome. Keep in touch!
Kieran Morrissey
Chief Technical Officer
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