Spring cleaning 101: Easy tips for optimizing your BLOX CMS site!

I can't tell you how many times I've designed a form that I want live but hidden on the "Site Forms' page. Not every form needs to be listed there. We can send links to the people who we actually want to fill out the forms. It would also enable us to test forms without the general public knowing they exist. And you may think "Nobody will ever go to the site forms page and see this form" but people always seem to find the areas of our site we never expect them to find.

As the form manager is now we have the option to "Disable." I would like to see an option "Hide" which would just hide the form's existence from the "Site Forms" page.

When we embed a video by first linking to it as an asset on our Town News site and then placing it on an article as a child asset, do the views count in YouTube?

I've been fooling with this all morning. I'll paste a link in and it gives me either our logo(which is set as the og_image on our site). I deleted that from the back-end because I never want that to show. Then it gives me the second child image. I want the first. So I set the second to "Do not publish" just to test it. THEN it shows the first child image. For crying out loud, why is this? And I'm not talking about an image the size of a fav icon. These images are in the range of 1296x864+. I know Facebook is particular about the size of the images. So it seems like for whatever reason Facebook only sees one image.

Here's one of the pages that refuses to display an image for Facebook: http://www.coastalillustrated.com/columns/community_notes/article_1f806700-eab3-11e5-b9ad-1b2a31f86771.html

Absolutely nothing comes up on Facebook for that one. Is it some way BLOX is displaying the images that prevents Facebook from seeing them? Are we doing something wrong?

I've read the BLOX documentation page and all it lists are the custom properties. These are URL custom properties but am I supposed to set it for ALL urls? Do I give the property og_image a value? The documentation says nothing about giving it a value. But all of the custom properties I know in BLOX have some sort of value.

Hi there,

We've had a sporadic problem where, in an article without an added image, Facebook is pulling in random images when users share a story (generally starting with a mugshot of the supervising editor or the author, because those are the largest images on a page). We have the Facebook og:image set to be just a plain Missourian logo, but it seems the sharing function is ignoring that altogether.

Has anyone run into this problem, and if so how did you go about resolving it?

Within a few FLEX blocks' template customizations there is an option for "Infinity scroll." I looked on here and help.bloxcms.com and there's nothing about the infinity scroll. I've tested it but can't get it to do anything. Is that feature live yet?

We needed an employee to have access to the subscriptions area of the site and it makes sense to also give that person access to users/accounts. Access to subscriptions is fine but to get access to users/accounts you have to be a manager. And as a manager you can do just about anything you want on the site. That's a HUGE gap in privilege.

Is there some way to allow someone to change user info without giving them the ability to move template blocks around, run jobs and change workflows?

I think a good way to approach this would be to create a "Circulation" or "User management" access level. This would give them the ability to start online subscriptions, access transactions and change user account info.

I’m curious why Collection assets are missing, among others, the Centerpiece flag?

Very often a Collection (Wildart Package, Enterprise package, etc.) will be the Centerpiece of our printed paper and thus we’d like it to be the Centerpiece of our website as well.

How difficult would it be to add this flag to Collections?

We are struggling with our RSS queries, because we use sort by priorities on our site - and would like our app to reflect much of the same. In applying the parameter to sort by 'priority', and then by date (for at least two day's worth, because we don't do a Sunday paper) it doesn't seem to be recognizing the stories with priorities set. Anyone have any expertise with search queries?

We have five ads in our leaderboard-middle region. One ad was from April 7-10 and needed 14,000 impressions. It got 4,000. Does the system not know to give the others less priority on those days to achieve the impressions of the limited run?

I put the 14k impressions in the "Total limit." Does that mean the system won't try to deliver 14k but that's just the max it can get? So "Total limit" is a limit and not a goal?

Mapping the subhead in TCMS to CMS would eliminate the need to copy subheads from the Print tab in TCMS to the Other tab so the subheads could be shown online. Doing this would allow the subhead (which may be modified on the page) to be consistent with the subhead online. Because editors don't go back to the asset to copy & paste the subhead from one tab to another, subheads online are missing. (NOTE: This only affects people with both TCMS and CMS.)

Currently, the publish time on article detail pages, for example, is displaying a mix of ways:

• Updated 21 hours ago (but no reference to the original publish time of day)
• 1 hour ago (but no reference to the original publish time--even thought it was only an hour ago)
• March 14, 2016 (but no reference to the original publish time of day)

For a reader's reference we need it to display more like on Zen:

Posted: Monday, March 14, 2016 3:30 p.m. | Updated: 3:40 p.m., Mon Mar 14, 2016

Maybe not exactly like so, but with more detail like so.

Is anyone familiar with how this is modified?

And just a side note: I've always wanted to have the ability to change "Posted:" to "Published:" site wide. It would help change the culture in our newsroom. When I can I remind staff that we publish to digital products just like we do to a newspaper page. We post our published content to social media.

Does anyone know weather facebook instant articles are about to support right to left languages such as hebrew?

thanks:)

Does any one know if there is a way to have a block within a global region appear only on the detail page and to be hidden on the index page. Also is there anyway to have a global region be sticky on a detail page?

At our April customer webinar , Tim Turner, Content Exchange program manager, discussed ways to grow your bottom line with value added content and TownNews.com's Content Exchange program.

Highlights include:

• Tips on making money from TownNews.com's FREE value added content options.

• Best practices for using articles, videos and more from the Content Exchange program on your site.

• How to encourage users to stay on your site longer and consume more content with recommendations.

For more information, download the slideshow or watch the recorded webinar today!