Welcome to the BLOX Digital (formerly TownNews) customer community! Connect with other BLOX Digital customers—and with us—to suggest features, share best practices and ask questions.

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Webinar recording: Introducing TownNews.com iQ Standard

anonymous 9 years ago 0

At our March webinar, Wesley Farris (TownNews.com iQ program manager) introduced the all-new iQ Standard tier, designed to help sites of all sizes use data to extract superior results from their programmatic and remnant advertising campaigns.


For more information, the recorded webinar today!

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Answered

Have form product selected by default?

Nick 9 years ago updated by Sean Bova | Web Developer 9 years ago 5

We're offering a product online with a BLOX form. We only have one product and want it to be selected by default. Is there a way to do this? Users can choose how many to purchase. But the only way I can get the radio selection to go away is to remove the ability to purchase multiple copies.

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calendar events displaying in AP Style

Jennifer Perkins 9 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

This is a feature request made by a newsroom editor for the display of events from the calendar component. She refers to the Summer Camp Fair item at the bottom of the screenshot below:


"AP Style specifies months and states of five or fewer letters should be spelled out. So in the calendar it should be March, June and July, NOT Mar, Jun and Jul.


When event occurs on the hour should be 1 p.m. Not 1:00 pm.
Only use : in time when there are minutes involved, i.e. 10:45 a.m., 2:30 p.m.
Dates are simply month followed by day: Nov. 4 or Jan. 22. Not Nov. 4th or Jan. 22nd.
Month and day should be set off from year with a comma.
So the entry I was attempting to fix would read:
Occurs from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on March 13, 2016."


Image 123


+2

Anyone successfully using push notifications with BLOX?

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

Like the subject suggests, we're interested in push notifications. Do any of y'all use them with BLOX and are you pleased with the functionality? Is the service through a 3rd party?

+1

Email Reach: Limited Access

Kevin M. Cox 9 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

This doesn’t appear to be possible with the current BLOX setup, but I’d love it if there was a way to allow certain employees to send a breaking news email alert without giving them access to the entire Email Reach area of BLOX.


I like to operate on the principle of least privilege whenever possible. So while I’m not worried about an editor purposefully messing with our other email lists, preventing them from having the access means they can’t accidentally break something either. They also don’t need to be messing with the Contacts list or anything else, simply sending the email.


In our specific case with breaking news, we have a list setup and always trigger it using the Single Run function. To make things even simpler, it is always the exact same URL we enter every single time.


As such all we really need is a “Send Email” button that an authenticated editor could press to fire it off.


Like I said I don’t think anything like this is possible, since the only option for granting someone Email Reach privileges is Full Access. But I wanted to get everyone’s thoughts.


Thanks.

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Webinar: Introducing TownNews.com iQ Standard

anonymous 9 years ago updated by Kevin M. Cox 9 years ago 1

Webinar: Introducing TownNews.com iQ Standard

Image 122

At our March webinar, Wesley Farris, TownNews.com iQ program manager, will introduce the all-new iQ Standard tier, designed to help sites of all sizes use data to extract superior results from their programmatic and remnant advertising campaigns.


We'll cover:

  • Trends in programmatic--where the market stands, and where it's going.
  • How to instantly boost CPMs on your unsold inventory--using the data you already have on hand.
  • How TownNews.com iQ Standard makes programmatic advertising easy and affordable--and how you can get started!

Join us on Thursday, March 3rd at 10:30 AM CST.

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Under review

Hard returns in assets

Craig V 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Nick 9 years ago 5
Why are hard returns turned into paragraphs when an asset is saved. Is there a way around this? Even if I add <br /> in html view it is still converted to a <p></p>
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Facebook Instant Articles

Kevin M. Cox 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Nick 9 years ago 1

Just wanted to open this topic up for discussion:


Facebook will open Instant Articles to all publishers on April 12


I'm skeptical on the value of this to publishers. What do y'all think?

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premium subscription icon

Jennifer Perkins 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Kevin M. Cox 9 years ago 1

This is a nice feature! Thanks for adding it.

it would be great to have a couple of setting options:

- the option to move it to the right of the headline

- the option to use a custom icon (like an image used as a favicon)


+3
Under review

form designer

Mike Stickler 10 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by anonymous 9 years ago 18
Is it just me or is the form designer an exercise in frustration for everyone.
+2

Ability to drag and drop the order of keywords in the asset admin

Jacki Gray 9 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

We need the same ability to drag and drop the order of keywords in the asset admin--the same way we can drag and drop the order of section tags.


For example, upon entry a reporter may enter them in a more random order. But and editor would rearrange them in order of importance. (I wasn't able to drag and drop keywords in Firefox or Chrome.)

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Answered

Email Reach Newsletter problem

Kevin M. Cox 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated 9 years ago 9

So we learned today that if a user unsubscribes from an email newsletter for any reason or through any method, the system will then prevent them from resubscribing to that newsletter in the future.


To me the worst part about this is that when that user attempts to resubscribe it silently fails. They receive no error message or warning that they are unable to subscribe. The mange newsletters box appears to show they are now subscribed but if they leave the page their subscriptions don’t “stick.” They’d only see this if they left and then returned to the same screen.


This became apparent with a call from a frustrated reader this afternoon. To them our website is simply broken.


I understand that Town News has to work within the confines of the Constant Contact system, but it really seems like there needs to be some additional functionality added around this feature.


We’re working hard to promote our newsletters and increase our subscribers to be more attractive to advertisers. This “bug” has the potential to cost us revenue.


For every reader that actually takes the time to reach out when they still don’t receive the emails, how many simply don’t bother and assume we just don’t know what we’re doing? 1 in 10?


Any thoughts?

+2
Under review

Allow blocks to be edited for a URL that has a redirect

Kevin M. Cox 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Christine Masters 9 years ago 1

I’m posting this here as part of my feature request to see if it would be helpful to anyone else.


Right now if you assign a redirect to a URL in BLOX you can no longer edit the underlying blocks in the Design screen. My request is to allow the blocks to still be edited while the redirect is in place.


This could be useful for when you want to undertake a major redesign of a section over a period of time without allowing readers to see the work in progress.


For us personally it is in relation to a yearly special section we publish. We’d like to redirect the main URL to last year's E-Edition while we totally rework the blocks on the section front. Unfortunately we can’t do it with the current way the system works.


So if you think this is a good idea give me an upvote please!

+2
Planned

Inline related content

Erica Smith 9 years ago updated by Christine Masters 9 years ago 1

You know how you can drag child assets into a story, creating in-line photo galleries, videos and links? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to do that with related content, too?

+4
Started

HTML descriptions are under the HTML — let's move 'em

Erica Smith 9 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Christine Masters 9 years ago 4

The description on an HTML asset acts as a summary, which is good. But click through on that HTML asset and the description shows up under whatever was entered as HTML. That means we're telling people to "take this quiz" only after they've scrolled past the quiz. That seems very silly to me — anyone else interested in trying to get descriptions to appear above HTML assets?


(I know I could add the HTML to an article asset and write whatever text and summary I want around the HTML. But that's a lot of extra steps.)