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Feature suggestion: Larger previews of attached child images
I often find myself having to choose a lead photo from the ones our photographer has attached to an asset. However, the previews are tiny when you hover your mouse over them. And even if you open the image asset, you really have to hit the "crop" button to get a larger view. And that just shows you one image at a time.
How about a special button that can open attached child images in a special "grid view" window that will let you see their previews at a larger (adjustable?) size. Bonus points if you can rearrange the children's order from that grid window.
Of course, I'd like to see this both in CMS, but especially in TCMS.
Feature Request: Allow a sub-domain to point to Flex templates during transition from Zen
We're in the middle of our transition from Zen to Flex and my biggest complaint is that there is no publicly viewable way for people without a BLOX admin account to preview the new site. The login requirement also makes it harder for us to test it on a multitude of devices.
Now obviously this won't help us since we'll be done with the transition before it could be implemented, but I think a really cool and helpful feature would be the ability to point a sub-domain at the Flex URL map before the switchover, and NOT require an admin login.
For example: http://beta.galvnews.com
Now obviously I can redirect a URL to the appropriate preview URL right now, and have already done so. But the login requiernment prevents us from sharing the preview of the new site with a reader advisory panel or colleagues at a sister paper, etc.
What do y'all think?
Feature request: Using cookies to remember users' preferences
Feature request: The ability to ask a user which 'section' of a site they'd like to default to next time they visit a certain page.
1) What problem(s) does this idea solve?
>> It's possible our company would one day like to market 1 URL to our readers instead of 3 (one for each market we cover). This feature would help us with our messaging.
2) Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible.
>> Example: Joe Smith visits theadvocate.com. He sees a window that asks if he'd like the site to remember which page he'd like to visit next time he comes to theadvocate.com. Joe says 'yes, I'd like to automatically be taken to the New Orleans section (theadvocate.com/new_orleans).
3) How often would you use this feature? >> Daily
4) How many people in your organization would use this feature? >> Everyone. About 100
5) Post on TownNews community forum >> Will do
Metered Paywall
Is anyone running a metered paywall (vs. a hard paywall)?
We’ve started discussing the pros/cons prompted by this article:
I’d appreciate any feedback y’all have on the subject.
Who else's site having issues for users on Safari w/ iOS 10+?
As TN has advised, clearing the browser cache fixes the problem (we believe). Has anyone else had the issue? It looks like this. Any success sharing cache-clearing tips to readers?
HTML assets and other assets in Facebook Instant
At the moment only related image assets are supported in Facebook Instant feeds. In the future, if the feed supported all related asset types TownNews could correctly integrate the widget as an HTML asset.
Would anyone else find this helpful? It'd allow
videos, tweet, FB posts, Instagrams posts, etc to be available in your
Instant Articles.
Please make "Broadcast" option available in Total CMS
It would also be nice to have the stories broadcast to the social media sites at the publication time set by the reporter.
We have customers that may have a TCMS site feeding multiple websites. The Broadcast channels may not line up one to one from TCMS to the website - it almost needs to be tied into the site tag somehow.
Column view choices in TCMS
I am probably not the first to suggest this feature, but for those of us in TCMS, are there plans to expand the options of column views under search results? Currently available are: Slug/Status/Sections/Authors/Priority/Start Time/Delete Time/Workflow/Print/Depth/Modify time/Modified by
Integration of Double Click for Small Business
All of date's news for a date in the past?
Just wondering if any had any input on this?
Here's the goal: Provide a datepicker interface that will select any date and display a page with all of the assets published on that day, on one page.
Approach 1: Custom search page.
Starting point is something like this: http://www.columbiatribune.com/search/?d=2016-04-09&l=100&app=editorial&type=article
Using the search parameters: http://help.bloxcms.com/knowledge-base/applications/design/templates/modules/by_application/type/search/article_33ecc2fa-6e9a-11e5-b11b-6f69a19d81ac.html
Ideally, we want to put all of a single section's news, grouped with its peers (other articles of the section) and sorted by display priority. For instance, display all of /news/ section and it's children, sorted by display priority. After that, display all of /sports/ and it's children, sorted by priority as well.
You can do this, but you can't do it on one page. You could do all of /sports/ like http://www.columbiatribune.com/search/?d=2016-04-09&type=article&c[]=sports* but you would have to ajax these onto the page in order to display multiple sections.
One way around this problem is to filter the array of search results that you get back.
searchResults = cms.search.results; articleGroup = tribune_filterAssetsByType(searchResults,'article','include'); newsGroup = tribune_filterByTopSection(newsGroup,'perspectives','exclude'); sportsGroup = tribune_filterByTopSection(articleGroup,'sports','include');
Where the filter macros just look for the appropriate sections or type and only return the correct ones. Because you're filtering by priority, this works, because you're not messing with the sorting, you're iterating in order. Behold, a list of assets of a section, sorted by priority, just like we want.
So this works great except for one sort of big caveat: When you have over 100 stories, it's incomplete. You can't return more than 100 search results at once, so you're stuck either ajaxing in the remainder after page load, which requires you writing a second version of your filtering at the script layer to do this... An inelegant solution at best.
Fantasy Approach 2: Using blocks
This isn't possible as far as I know right now. It also avoids all custom programming sorts of stuff and fits right into the "everything is a block" paradigm and that's great. If you had some way to grab url query parameters or read POST parameters out of the page request inside the block query rules, you could do some cool stuff.
Here's an example of how this might work:
In block query rules, you add "Start Date time" rule. In the operation list, there's a "From Request" and then an input to enter the name of a URL parameter.
That's all the user facing stuff that would be needed.
This blows open what is possible with blocks, IMHO. I could build my project above in 15 minutes and be done.
With this and some way to define URL routes and act on them, BLOX becomes a much more powerful framework. Say you wanted to make /archive/2015/ point to a landing page for 2015 or archive yyyy to go to any year's page, but you didn't want to define hundreds of years by hand and thousands of months under them, you need some sort of routing interface and some way to get that routing info into the Blocks.
Only actual approach 3: Using javascript
The search page has a JSON output, with f=json. That means I could load lots of search pages with whatever parameters I choose, parse the JSON, and build a page. Downsides, I need to make a version of card_summary in JS to put the things on the page.
This would be good practice for a native app as well.
Change google's description of my site
I want to change this description of my website, our school changed its name. What do I have to do to change this
You'll need to change the metadata of the pages being indexed. The help documentation provides some instruction on this:
If you've change the name of the paper and need the site's titles changed - you'll also need to update your settings in the menu entry Settings > Site. Note that it may take a bit for search engines to pick up the changes though there are ways to convince Google to check back a bit sooner in the webmaster tools for the site in Google:
Block Syndication Import in TotalCMS
Is there a way to disable the importing of assets from a Syndication channel?
We created one in TotalCMS that allows us to easily search our website since it contains years of articles that aren’t in TCMS. However when users import these articles is creates the potential for them to show up on the website twice.
It would be great if there was an option for a “read-only” syndication channel that disables the Add to Site function.
Feature request: 1+ people working in same asset
It'd be awesome if BLOX allowed multiple people to be working the same asset simultaneously AS LONG AS they were working in separate fields.
For example, one person correcting a headline mistake, another fleshing out body copy and another attaching a photo.
If there was field access, instead of asset access, that would go a long way in helping with big breaking news.
Feature request: Instant link on BLOX from phone
Our guys love posting to BLOX from their phones. But they aren't able to quickly get a link to tweet or FB when posting on the phone like they do on laptop.
We would use this feature A LOT. Everyone in our newsroom would use.
Example: New Orleans Saints sign Drew Brees to new contract. Reporter finds out while on practice field. Needs to file and disseminate news from phone. Can't do latter.
Repercussions of changing wireframes
How many times have you wanted to change the wireframe you're using? I've successfully changed non-home pages with no issues. But I know as soon as I switch wireframes on the home page it's going to completely screw up all of my other pages. Has anyone done this? If so how did it affect the inside pages?
This may be for another post but I think something that would really help would be the ability to create regions. How hard would that be for a non-UTL user?
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