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 This functionality has been removed from webpages and is now been replaced by a URL redirect manager which you can access by going to Website 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.

What Business Catalyst Needs from Adobe

I wonder how far Adobe looked into Business Catalyst before deciding to bring it into the Adobe stable of products a few months ago?

Business Catalyst claims to be an “Online Business Building Tool” and, yes, it offers a wide variety of functions in a single online tool. But this very diversity is also its undoing. It is broad, but it is also shallow. And it is immature.

The shallowness is revealed to the web developer as soon as they start to use the system in earnest. It manifests in every aspect of the product. It is a system which does the basics in each functional area, but no more. It lacks the sophistication and polish of the specialised tool designed to do one job only and do it really well. By trying to do all jobs it does nothing particularly well.

The experienced designer and/or web developer will have used many different tools and systems in their career. Some tools are created so carefully and meticulously that it is a joy to use them. This cannot be said of Business Catalyst. It is tolerable experience and that is all one can say.

One only has to peruse the Business Catalyst support forums periodically to pick up the sentiment of frustration expressed by many users. There is a constant flow of messages from web developers wanting to do something which seems simple and sensible who are informed by the Business Catalyst support people that their expectation is not possible. The system cannot do this or that. Sometimes these limitations are almost crippling and the workarounds can be truly arcane.

Every time I pay a visit to these forums, I am struck by the palpable sense of anger coming through in some of the messages. People are not happy about a lot of things in Business Catalyst.

What can Adobe bring to this situation?

Hopefully wisdom and depth and thoroughness.

Do you read the 37signals blog articles about their design process? Perfectionists they are and it shows in their apps (Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise, etc). Business Catalyst needs developers and a development process of that calibre.

It’s a big ask because Business Catalyst is a jack of all trades and it needs to be a master of all those trades as well, instead of a master of none.

Here’s hoping for improvement.

Literature: Tags Not Granular Enough

I was planning to start this blog with an article about setting up a Business Catalyst shop. But that’s a long article and in the mean time Business Catalyst continues to frustrate with the enduring problem of arbitrary and unnecessary limitations.

Today’s example is the “Literature” feature.

Literature is intended for downloadable documents such as PDF files, MP3 files and so on. It offers tracking of download statistics as well as the ability to protect a file inside a “private” membership area, etc. In this way it differs from vanilla file uploads to the Business Catalyst (virtual) file system.

So far so good. However I soon discovered that adding a link to a web page to download a literature item lacks flexibility. When you insert a literature item in a page, it adds a {module …} placeholder to the page which is dynamically replaced by some generated HTML. What is this generated HTML?

It is controlled by a “Literature Layout” which is a template snippet that includes a series of tags and some HTML markup. Problem is that the tags available are very limited. This is the same problem I’ve encountered in the shop and elsewhere in Business Catalyst — the provided tags offer the absolute minimum of functionality. There’s no reason for this. With a tag lookup mechanism already present in the “page renderer”, adding extra tags would not be difficult.

What is needed in this specific case of “Literature” are more granular tags. For example, I want to associate my own graphic button with the link to the literature item. But the only tag I’m offered that generates (and knows about) the actual link to the literature item is the “name” tag (tag_name). This generates the name of the literature item and the link. All together and inseparable. Not useful. I need also a tag that just generates the href so I can compose my own link tag with custom image content.

I’m moving pages from an existing static website into Business Catalyst and already have pages with links to MP3 files which are nicely formatted with graphic buttons and so on. I had to give up on using the Business Catalyst “Literature” function because it just doesn’t fit the way I want to present the links to these “literature” items.

Let us hope that the Adobe acquisition will result in an influx of new design and programming talent so that these myriad limitations are addressed.