RELEASE NOTES R180 - scheduled for September 25th 2012

Question

We are announcing a new Business Catalyst release, scheduled to go live on Tuesday, September 25th.
This release includes some great improvements to our module templates, new features for our email marketing system, admin interface improvements, a few infrastructure updates and lots of bug corrections.
Read through the following sections to get detailed information about this release:
Features and enhancements
Issues fixed by this release
You can jump to the corresponding section by clicking the above links.
Features and enhancements
Modules improvement
Starting with our September release, we have enabled users to use a html page or a static template as a module list template (layout) for all modules that are using templates today. The new addition allows partners to create different views for the same data for a personalize experience. To use this new functionality, just create a new module template and update your module properties by specifying the template to use.
Ex: {module_blogsitepost,2 template="/ModuleTemplates/Custom/MyTemplate.tpl"}
Note: although you can use any extension you feel comfortable with, we recommend using a .tpl extension for two reasons: help locate the template better and avoid having these templates being displayed in Page list.
Email marketing application improvements
This is release is packed with new features and enhancements to our email marketing system.
Dynamic modules in email campaign - you can include modules (a subset of 19 modules) in the Email Campaigns content; the system will render these modules right before the campaign is sent, making sure your customers always receive the latest content;
Fresh, new email templates - the release includes a set of new of new email templates that look much better; along with these new templates, the template selection page was re-done to show better thumbnails;
Improved recipients selection - we have improved the recipients wizard step, replacing the checkbox list with a smart search and select control; additionally, with this release you will be able to  select multiple lists (including Customer Reports) to exclude from your campaign.
Improved campaign status screen - before sending the campaign, you will now be able to view the exact number of recipients before sending the campaign (Note: reports and list requiring a long time to compute will be approximated); additionally, while the campaign is sending, we are displaying a meaningful status, that indicates that the campaign is being sent.
Email clients reporting - the campaign report screen has also been improved to include a report showing you the email clients used to read your campaigns.
Admin console improvements
We have updated our new admin user interface and replaced the insert module and insert tag panels with the new Business Catalyst toolbox almost everywhere. With the new toolbox we'll make it easier for partners and business owners to insert and customize module or tags into pages, templates or system emails. The toolbox user interface will opened by default for partners for faster access to tags and modules.
Other changes
Some  FTP improvements (better error codes, performance, etc) and SFTP support
DNS improvements (support for setting up Google Apps email out of the box, several bug fixes)
When you change your email address on adobe.com, it syncs automatically with BC
Various improvements of the caching engine for static assets
Issues fixed by May release
Issue 2869695 - Fixed an issue that broke the comments submitted by visitors by placing <br> tags after a random number of characters;
Issue 3317538 -     Fixed an issue preventing the social media modules from being reinitialized after pressing "Add to cart"
Issue 3317105 -     Files with spaces in the name do not get invalidated properly on FTP/API delete
Issue 3317478 -     Fixed an issue causing hardcoded http paths to generate security alerts when on https
Issue 2567045 -     Fixed an issue with Product Purchased with Details data field
Issue 2567131 -     Fixed an issue causing web app creation forms to generate  [No Name] duplicates
Issue 3319245 -     Fixed the search function on Help & Support
Issue 3320623 -     Fixed an issue causing decimal prices to be incorrectly saved when editing/creating an order in admin and having the site admin language set to a country language that uses "," as decimal separator instead of "."
Issue 3325526 -     Fixed an issue causing the CRM Session verification to fail for session IDs that contain +
Issue 3162093 - Fixed a problem [AdminV4] HTML files for campaigns can't be edited
Issue 3009528 -     Updated multiline fields to allow line breaks
Issue 3010606 -     Changed FTP blog layouts  listing  to properly handle cases of invalid layout group names
Issue 3315646 -     Fixed an issue causing {tag_blogcategorylist}to not limit the number of results as set
Issue 3316323 -     Small bug/improvement at offline payments on copy/pasting the PDF password
Issue 2900590 -     Fixed an issue causing a correct web app item address to change to another one on some sites
Issue 3319299 -     Fixed some performance problems causing Edit Web Apps Settings -> Autoresponder  interface to freeze
Issue 3320422 -     "Free shipping" not validated when enforcing shipping validation
Issue 2918069 -     Cannot save values properly for webapp items when the custom field uses comma separated checkbox list, and it has more then 265 characters for the list of values
Issue 2925458 -     Web App edit form is adding "X_" to the existing classes inside the description field. Every edit will add another x_ ending up in something like class="x_x_x_classname"
Issue 2567035 -     Can not list files in FTP when there are invalid characters or similar in the directory
Issue 3313655 -     Import fails if the username column values are already in the CRM
Issue 3315485 -     Varnish cache is not invalidated when overwriting files with %20 in the path
Issue 3315372 -     When adding a new item in the admin the address fields is pre-populated
Known issues and limitations
Product list layout outputs the products using an unordered list, requiring CSS for better formatting
Favorites module does not support multiple templates (layouts)
Module detail views do not support multiple templates (layouts)
Recursive modules are not supported in email campaign preview
Dreamweaver design view, ignores the custom template and always renders the tags from the default template (layout)
For more information about this, follow the release announcement on the Business Catalyst blog: Introducing our feature packed September release!

Answer 1

Thanks Mario, what is missing from the post and this notification is a fundamental pieces of information "TIMES". This is not just your info but also the release by Jackson Palmer on the blog - totally missed there also
We need to be notified of the sceduled timing of this release not just a vague date which is not specific globally
25th but we are global - what time specifically 0100am PST is very different to 1030pm PST , the latter being 26th in AU
Why - because campaigns scheduled for around this time can be impacted, and also if the sites go offile during the maintenance window campaigns can be a wasted exercise.
Previously mid week schedules have been a matter of heated discussion, yet the support guys say that schedule ahas not been decided upon
Not planning is planning to fail, and we have witnessed that all to ofetn in the past. BC unfortunately has a history of failing to plan and inform, and this does little to activate confidence in the community.
I have discussed with Dragos on numerous occassion how the missing ingridents at BC like communication, UX, planning and most importantly understanding from the customer perspective (rather than backroom coders).
eg at 645am 26th of Sept 2012 we have a email campaign scheduled ( and can be rescheduled ), the issue I see is without your maintenance window timings being published in a timely manner how can we tell if we move to a sooner or later timing. You have to agree it is disasterious marketing to blast out a campaign and find systems down when customers open newsletter offers and want to shop then.
If the time schedule is listed somewhere else even more shame that it is overlooked as an inclusion here plus that Chat team are not informed and kept up to date and the blog is just fluff sales and chest beating. That is not support of partners regargless of paid or free status.
To much time is wasted with this sort of unthinking about unpublished / incomplete notifications, Live chat guy wasted > 15 min of his and my time becuase they don't know either, how many others are being inconvenienced by fialing to plan and notify information to  act upon, this communication in the blog is good info but by itself useless and creates more doubt and lack or faith. Just look at the "hope in the comments"