External URL Redirects Are Broken

On 14th February 2010, Business Catalyst announced the following change to the url redirection facility:

“One wish-list item that’s been asked for is to be able to view all URL redirects in one central location. Previously URL redirects were stored inside the webpage detailed view so it was difficult to find them. This functionality has been removed from webpages and is now been replaced by a URL redirect manager which you can access by going to Website > Web Pages > Manage URL Redirects. They now have their own interface where you can see the list of redirects on your site and easily create, edit and delete them.”

Unbelievably BC have broken the redirect functionality with this recent “improvement”. It is no longer possible to create redirects to external sites (i.e. to arbitrary urls).

This is an essential function when some elements of a website are not hosted at BC but you still want to provide a url within the normal site domain.

I have used this to set up exactly this kind of redirect. Now we have lost the old interface (which did allow external redirects) and gained a new “aggregated” interface which does NOT allow external redirects. Instead we get one of those infuriating popup-style text fields (like BC uses for dates) which does not allow direct typing.

Is this a deliberate design decision (certainly not mentioned in the feature announcement), or is it the case that nobody at BC bothered to test properly this new “feature”?

Blogging in BC Needs an Overhaul

The Blog module in Business Catalyst, like most of the system, is adequate for basics. However it is nowhere near as flexible as dedicated blogging systems like WordPress and the like.

In setting up my first blog with BC, the limitations are appearing pretty quickly.

One example: The subtemplate used to display an individual blog post within a whole series of blog posts on the “front page” of the blog is exactly the same template used to display an individual blog post on a page by itself (i.e. on its “permalink” page).

This means that there is no way to change the presentation format of a blog post depending on its display context (i.e. full listing of posts vs. individual post).

A client has requested that the “Comments” link be removed from the shortened “preview” version of posts on the full listing page, but be preserved when viewing the full blog post by itself.

This is simply not possible with the current design.

It is a specific example of a more widespread disease within BC. That is the lack of fine-grained control of pretty well everything. The whole notion of customisable subtemplates for the various elements of the system needs to be expanded greatly. There needs to be much more fine grained control of all aspects of presentation.

This is not difficult. Ask someone who has experience using other, more mature, blogging or CMS systems. They will already be familiar with how to do it.

The new Adobe-BC team have announced that they are working on a better blogging system. Let’s hope they address these issues in a comprehensive way.