:Apogee StoreFront v 1.3.1 Release Notes
Apogee StoreFront 1.3.1 is a minor update of the integrated web-to-print system of Agfa Graphics. It is scheduled to be released on May 12, 2013. The main new features in Apogee StoreFront 1.3.1 are:
- A footer can be added to order confirmation e-mails
- An image search window is available in the Online Editor
- Improvements for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
More information is available in the Online Help and the Online Help Addendum. Existing users should check the post-update guidelines
New features
Customizable footer
Order related e-mails and the Order Details page of each order can now be personalized by adding a footer. This footer can contain text but also tables, images, hyperlinks, etc. Below is an example of such a footer
The footer can be used to inform users about:
- invoicing
- who to contact in case they have questions about their order
- the address & VAT number or tax code of the company shipping the order
- upcoming promotions
Support for bullet points
In the Text tab in the Online Editor the Paragraph Settings pane now contains two icons that allow you to indent text and add a bullet point to each line.
Image search in libraries
The 1.3.1 update adds a 'Search' field in the image libraries of the Online Editor. It allows users to search the library for images based on their file name. Other meta data such as EXIF-information or tags are ignored.
Changes by design
Softproofs are now only available in the shopping cart as high-res PDF files
In the past weeks a few customers have reported that for some of their orders the PDF Preview files did not accurately represent the final print-ready PDF files that are sent to Apogee Prepress. This happened with softproofs generated in the Online Editor and with softproofs that print buyers downloaded from their shopping cart. In all cases the visual artifacts were caused by image downsampling. To avoid such inconsistencies the StoreFront team has decided to (temporarily) deactivate image downsampling and disable the softproofing feature in the Online Editor.
SEO improvements
To optimize the way public stores are indexed by Google and other search engines, the following improvements are implemented:
- The <title> tag has been optimized: For the home page the name of the store is used. For the support pages the 'Title' of the page is used, followed by the piping symbol and the name of the store, for example 'How to order products | SunDiver'. For other pages it contains the category name or product name followed by the piping symbol and the name of the store, for example 'Vertus catalog 2013 | SunDiver'.
- The <meta> description tag is added: For the home page, support pages and product pages the first 160 characters of the body text are now used for the <meta> description tag.
- Search engines can be informed about pages that should not get indexed, such as the empty shopping cart page or search results pages. This is done using a 'robots.txt' file that is managed by the StoreFront team. This file has been refined to exclude more pages that are irrelevant for search engines.
Post-update Guidelines
Some of the changes and new features in this release require an intervention from a printer administrator:
Action 1 | Configure the use of a watermark on all softproofs if you relied on softproofs being down-sampled as a security measure (see the Online Help Addendum for more information) |
Action 2 | If you previously used a script to center the page footer in a store that uses a custom background, that script can now be removed. That bug is fixed in this release. |