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Answered

Embracing HTTPS - NYTimes.com

Kevin M. Cox 10 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Christine Masters 9 years ago 9
http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/embracing-https/

Interesting article from the NYT. I'm curious to hear what everyone thinks.

We're already moving this direction with our non-Town News sites and wonder what challenges we'd encounter trying to go all HTTPS on Town News?
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Answered

Bug in event time display in calendar block template

Jacki Gray 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Phil Pracht (Product Manager) 9 years ago 1

The block template called "Calendar: Event list (flex)" has a bug and displays "12 am" for the "time" rather than "all day" as it does on the asset detail page.

We can not present inaccurate information like so. Can we get this fixed in the template?


Image 153


Here is a sample Calendar detail page with correct "all-day" information:

Answer

Hi Jacki!


We're already aware of this issue and have a fix planned. Thanks!


Phil

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

anonymous 9 years ago 0

Image 152


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


Spring is here, and it's a great time to think about updating and cleaning up your BLOX CMS site! At our May customer webinar, Christine Masters, director of product management, will discuss a variety of ways to refresh and renew your website.

We'll cover:

- Keeping your site up-to-date by cleaning out old blocks, auditing your admins and evaluating your ads.

- Freshening up your front page with new display blocks.

- Making sure your site is mobile-ready and search optimized.

- And much, much more!

Join us on Thursday, May 5th at 10:30 AM CDT.

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Completed

We need a way to HIDE live forms on the forms page

Nick 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Rich Griffin | Product Manager (Product Manager) 9 years ago 2

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.

Answer

Hi Nick,

There is a way to make this happen currently.

  1. Go to the block editor for /site/forms
    1. Open the form index block and and in the appearance tab content fieldset add "/site/forms" the the base url setting. This setting limits the links displayed to only those that are assigned to that base url.
  2. Create a url in the url map that can be used to assign forms to that you don't want displayed and assign the forms skin to it. Instructions for setting up a url and assigning a skin to can be found here LINK
      1. open up the form you want not to display and assign it to that url in the properties>General tab>url setting. You can see how to assign a form to the url you created here

The forms assigned to the second url will not display in the form listing on the site forms page and you will be able to provide a link directly to any of the forms there as well.

Best Regards,

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Do views of embedded YouTube videos count?

Rebecca Fellenbaum 9 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

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?

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Under review

Facebook refuses to pull child images

Nick 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Christine Masters 9 years ago 23

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.

+1
Answered

Facebook pulling in wrong image when posts are shared

Rob Weir 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Christine Masters 9 years ago 7

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?

Answer
Christine Masters 9 years ago

Make sure your og image is the right size. Facebook has increased their desired og image sizes in the past few years, and if it doesn't like your og image (even though that's the image you are specifically telling them to use) they will use something else instead.


They recommend these sizes:


https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices#images

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Under review

No documentation on FLEX infinity scroll

Nick 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Christine Masters 9 years ago 1

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?

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Under review

Big gaps between Group - Access levels

Nick 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated 9 years ago 2

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.

+1
Planned

Feature Request: Add Centerpiece flag to Collection assets

Kevin M. Cox 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Christine Masters 9 years ago 6

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?

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Anyone out there using WHIZ technologies for their app?

Lindy 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Andrea 9 years ago 3

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?


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Answered

We had an ad not meet its impression limit. Why does this occur?

Nick 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated 9 years ago 3

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?

+3

Map the print subhead in Total CMS (TCMS) to the subhead in CMS automatically

Donald 9 years ago in BLOX Total CMS 0

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.)

+4

Is there a site setting for the formatting of the display of publish times and updates for Flex?

Jacki Gray 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Michael Becker 9 years ago 2

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.

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facebook instant articles right to left

Yael Kremer 9 years ago updated by Christine Masters 9 years ago 1

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


thanks:)

Answer
shadyanwar 9 years ago

Yes. Having tested IA today, you can simply edit the code of the published post and make sure the html tag has the direction attribute set to right-to-left: <html dir="rtl">