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Classified Ad Refuses to Publish?
I've had this happen with an article before and it's completely ludacris. No matter how many times I try and post it, including deleting the ad and starting a new one, it refuses to publish to the website. Are there some sort of page-breaking symbols I'm unintentionally adding?
Implementing 360 videos and photos
With "VR" and other 360 degree cameras becoming more readily avaliable and affordable, we need a way to be able to upload and share our photos and videos. We can get it to work with HTML assets and other tricks, but it would be nice if it was "dumbed down" for our editors so they could just make a 360 asset and be done with it. Google has a VR viewer that could easily be intergrated into BLOX.
https://developers.google.com/vr/concepts/vrview
There is also Pannellum, which is what we're using: https://pannellum.org
Love the photo-swipe part of 'utility: full article' ... can that be applied to 'card: showcase' as well?
Was wondering that photo-swipe option found in 'utility: full article' could be included as an option in 'card: showcase?' Or maybe it already is and I'm missing it?
Can search words be highlighted?
When clicking on an asset in search results, it would be extremely helpful if the words used in the search could be highlighted in some fashion. Make the text a different color, bold the text -- anything to help us find the search words quickly. An older system we had did just that.
Any way to add block to story pages for specific section/urls?
Hey all...
Like the title says, is there any way to automatically add a block into a story page?
I've got a funky secondary nav I want to add to a section of our site, and I don't see any easy way to do it.
I'm honestly thinking the easiest way might be to use javascript to create the elements on each load, which is just absurd...I'm sure there's an easier way that I'm missing.
Thanks Folks
Would putting the block that you want on the pages into the Utility region for All Assets Top of Main Container work?
If open the Utility regions for a section, then anything you put in those regions only applies to that section. If you want something to apply to the whole site, you open the Utility regions on your homepage layout.
How do I add author biography and story recommendations under an article?
Is it in the utility regions under Bottom of Artilcle?
Mainly want to know how to create a block with recommended articles that will display under an article. What kind of parameters like sections would I set to that block so it would show recommended stories? Or is there a way to automatically set that?
As far as creating author biographies for employees (or in our case freelance writers) would they have to be the one to create the assets within BLOX or is there a way for us to set the author as a different person and create accounts for them?
For the recommended articles, the first question that I have is how are you determining what articles to recommend? If you signed up for the iQ Engage program (https://www.townnews365.com/solutions/products/data_management/iq-engage/article_3d0cdd9c-0ff8-11e7-a92b-e3179d72894c.html), you'll want to use a Card: Grid Behavioral block (https://help.bloxcms.com/knowledge-base/applications/design/blocks/page_customizations/article_549440ba-1325-11e7-bf32-8b5023483ffd.html). I believe you use the Asset query field under Content to determine what articles get shown to the user. And each user will get a set of articles that based on his or her preferences
If you aren't using iQ Engage and you are picking a set group articles to recommend all readers no matter what their preferences are, such as articles flagged Editor's Pick or just the articles from a particular section, then you would use a regular Card: Grid block and set up your query parameters to pull in just the articles with that flag or from that section.
In both of these cases, you would put the block that you make into a utility region. I believe the Bottom of Article region is one that TN suggests for the placement of iQ Engage block, but you could put the block in another region if you really wanted to.
For the author bios, if you are talking about something like this:
you put that text in the author's user account on the Profile tab in the About me area.
You'll also need to make sure that the page customizations for the site or the section that the articles are includes both the byline and the author or just the author depending on what you want. That setting is under Misc and it's called Asset author display. You don't need to create any blocks for this. The author display setting takes care of adding the information automatically.
Once you have created the freelance writer's account, you can create the asset and pick that person as the author. The freelancer doesn't have to create the article.
We would love to be able to center tweets using the Twitter function within a story asset.
We are loving the new alignment features that were just released for child assets. Stories are way more engaging and better looking with the new options. We've tried to use the Twitter function, but have noticed those cannot be formatted. Would it be possible to have them automatically centered in stories, or given the option to align right, left, center like the other child assets?
Actually I think you're right. It is left-aligned (but not floated) on regular stories. On long-form mode, it sticks out awkwardly to the left.
I will see if we can center both with CSS for now.
Adding alignment options will be more complicated than a simple CSS fix, but I think that's a good idea if it is possible.
Auto approve updated calendar events
When someone creates a calendar event we get a notification to approve the event. That's great. But if they update the event we get another notification that we have to approve the update. I don't want new events to be auto approved but I would like updated events to be auto approved.
Can we get an option to auto approve updated events?
Hi Nick,
Providing an option to auto-approve event updates would be a feature request. I would be remiss if I didn't point out that this request would allow users to update previously approved events with descriptions or images a site might deem inappropriate.
Has that been considered?
The current workflow, while it may require additional time, allows for proper vetting at each point during the submission process.
Feature request: Better presentation of sibling assets
Right now, if you have multiple sibling assets on an article, the first asset has an image, headline and summary. The remaining assets are just headlines. (Left)
We'd like siblings to be presented more like child assets; each one getting an image, headline and summary. (Right)
Hi guys!
We have an option for this!
If you go to the URL properties, under General Design, there is a choice for "Related asset display." You can choose between one card and then headlines (default), all headlines, or all cards (which is what you want).
We build this specifically for sites who were using lots of children in order to get the card display. We'd prefer you to use siblings for semi-related items, and children for very closely related items. If you want them to display as cards, you can use this option. =)
Remember that asset relationship has a specific interpretation by our software, and we make decisions based on those interpretations. This is why, for example, child assets syndicate along with their parent - because children are meant as an important (even necessary) element of the story. Siblings, for example, do not syndicate, because they are supposed to be only slightly related.
I hope this helps! =)
Does anyone use OneSignal for desktop push?
Hi y'all, does anyone OneSignal (or another vendor) for desktop push?
Headline link/summary/asset inline presentation examples?
I'm looking for good examples of these new inline display properties for image (or other) elements: Headline link, summary, asset presentation
Hi Jayson!
Here is a general overview in our online documentation.
I also put together a testing page with many examples of inline styles. There are some really cool ones... check out an inline mapped presentation, or the panorama collection. Neat stuff!
Note that the "full viewport" options, like full-bleed or parallax, only works on long-form presentation articles, because it needs a guarantee that the story area will be full-width of the page.
Here is an example of the same story in default article presentation (no long-form), so you can see the same articles in a normal asset situation. You can see that they also don't "stick out" from the column of the article.
Hurricane Tracker
Anybody have a suggestion for a good, free embeddable hurricane tracker map for use on our websites?
This one has potential, but it always defaults to the alphabetical first storm instead of the wider view or (currently) the second storm on the list: https://project.wnyc.org/hurricane-tracker/index.html
I miss the days when StormPulse was free...
I'm going with this one for now, but would still definitely be interested to hear what others are doing.
https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=2f5a28f82f4d41ec8dbe6cf96375a970
Adding "saving disabled ... locked" messaging to blocks
We're having trouble recently with multiple editors being able to access the same block and are saving over each others' changes.
Can this type of "locked" asset messaging be added to blocks? "Saving disabled: this asset is locked by XXXXX"
1. What problem(s) does this idea solve? Editors not saving over each others' work when they both have the same block open.
2. Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible. Editor adjusts order of stories in a block. Unknowingly another editor has the same block open and saves over the other's work.
3. How often would you use this feature? Daily
4. How many people in your organization would use this feature? Everyone
What happened to in-line photos in FLEX?
Zen has fairly decent in-line photo options. If I dragged a photo into the body of an article it would stay right where I put it as long as the presentation was "None." That was great because if the photo was for a specific section of the article it ensured that was where it displayed. The new "Long-form" and "Personality" presentations have abandoned that. FLEX has abandoned that altogether. So even in "None" it puts the images wherever it wants to in the body.
For example...
Here you have the Zen photo display. A lot of white space but at least I KNOW the photo will go with the content.
On the other hand...
This is FLEX. Is that photo of a scarf headband, a fake knot or a hidden knot? I can't tell.
So could we please have more options for displaying in-line photos? I want to switch our magazine to FLEX because the templates are far superior to Zen. But I I feel like we're taking a step backward when I can't display in-line photos that stay with their corresponding body copy. I'd love to be able to display in-line photos as full width photos so there isn't that white space seen in the top screenshot. But I prefer the white space over the random image placement.
Flex does full-width inline photos (which was a highly requested feature), instead of 300px like Zen.
The problem was that if you had a vertical image, being full-width ended up with REALLY BIG images that looked pretty crazy.
So now we do a check - if it is a vertical image (as you show here), it will float right. If it is horizontal, it will be full-width. Most of the time this works well since you're just trying to put the image near the copy, and it looks better since it is not super huge.
In your case I would recommend cropping the image to be slightly horizontal (literally one pixel more width than height) and it will be full-width in the article as you intend.
(We do have a feature request in to add some tools to inline photos to give them some options... like half-width, float left, float right, etc. So you can choose more of the display. We are hoping it will be on the docket for next year but I don't have an ETA yet.)
Setting up tracking for FB Instant and Google AMP in GA
Hi y'all, we're on board with TownNews' preferred Google Analytics setup now (woo hoo!) ... Now that's done, we'd like to setup a way to track analytics for Facebook Instant articles and Google AMP pages. Because the URLs generated for those pages aren't always on a site's domain, how do you accomplish this in GA?
Hey Kevin!
We're actually in the process of experimenting with this so we can document it with our full GTM launch.
Because Google AMP requires its own GTM container, you can just tell that container to create an AMP dimension for each page view.
For FBIA, you should be able to track tncms.page.platform = 'facebook instant articles'.
Like I said, this is still in test mode, but let me know if you need more explanation or help setting this up.
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