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.

Though BLOX Digital representatives often participate in discussions, this is not a customer service site. For immediate help, call 800-293-9576 or submit a support request via our online ticketing system.

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Under review

How do a I change the size of marketplace logos?

Nick 10 years ago in BLOX CMS updated 10 years ago 2
I know I can change the size of the image with css but it stretches the logo beyond it's actual width. So is there a way to tell the back-end to display a logo with a larger width? I tried the "Logo preview widths" and uploaded a new image but it still gave me a width of 200px that ends in ".preview-200.jpg" When I change the number in that just to test the file it doesn't find an image.
+2

Multiple print publications on single TCMS asset

Michael Becker 10 years ago in BLOX Total CMS updated by Kevin M. Cox 10 years ago 1
I'm cross-posting this here at the suggestion of the customer service tech to see if other TotalCMS sites would be interested.

We have run into a situation where we have obituaries (in the form of article assets) that need to run on more than one day in print. Because of the budgeting limitations in TCMS, you can't assign an asset to more than one edition of a single publication -- just one print placement.

I'm arguing that TCMS should allow us to schedule a single asset to as many print placements as needed or desired, rather than us having to create multiple copies of an asset (each with its own publication placement) or simply having to remember to change the publication on the original asset day-to-day.

I'm all for a solution that keeps a single asset in the system, rather than duplicates, which run the risk of transferring over to the hosted Blox side, where multiples of the same asset could cause confusion for front-end users (especially in searches.) Imagine searching for grandma's obituary only to find three copies of it online, one for each day it ran in print -- each with its own comments and URL.

Anyone else second this? Have a suggested solution for our workflow?
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Under review

Sorting assets with children first

Nick 10 years ago in BLOX CMS updated 10 years ago 2
I know there is a query rule to only display assets with child assets but is there(or will there be) a sorting rule to show assets with children first? Often times only a few of our local articles have photos. The editors are supposed to give articles priorities each night to ensure the ones with photos display at the top but that doesn't always happen. This can be troublesome, especially on the weekends when I'm much more concerned with enjoying my time off than checking BLOX.
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Collection > Pesentation (Series)

Craig V 10 years ago in BLOX CMS 0
For collection with presentation set to (Series), is there a way to make the thumbnail size larger?
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First Thursday Webinar

anonymous 10 years ago 0
At this month's FREE webinar, we'll discuss exciting new features, important updates and helpful tips. Topics will include:

  • How to quickly and easily reformat your front page for breaking news, special events and more!
  • Boosting your editorial efficiency with our new and improved BLOX CMS workflow features.
  • Auditing your Google, Facebook and Twitter API settings to keep social media broadcasting and federated login running smoothly.
Register today!

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Answered

Add Survey Form to New Asset types

Christopher Aune 10 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Christine Masters 10 years ago 4
I'd like to have an Input Form available thru BLOX CMS New Asset types so that community youth sports coaches can send in their box scores and provide a brief comment to a few simple questions. Questions would vary according to season/sport. About half of coaches feel comfortable sending me an email, but the other half need prodding to get a comment out of them -- an essential for a story. I don't have time to chase them all down each week. Here's an example that I helped set up with one local sports team:http://www.seiunitedsoccer.org/Default.aspx?tabid=846271. When they complete the form and hit the Submit button, the info should come to me in an email. This should actually be easier than the Poll asset that's already available, but the answers would vary instead of multiple choice. Can we do this? Thanks.
Answer
Christine Masters 10 years ago
Hi Christopher!

Looking at your example, this looks very much like something you should be able to build with BLOX Forms. You can set up a new questionnaire, set yourself as the recipient, e-mail the link to the coaches. The submissions would then be e-mailed to you, as well as be available in the Form Submissions panel for review (in case you are on vacation and someone has to fill in, etc.)

Here are our docs:

http://docs.townnews.com/kbpublisher/Forms-Manager-Overview_6417.html

Hope this helps! =)

Christine

+1

Geolocations and Blocks

Craig V 10 years ago in BLOX CMS 0
What is the best way to query a block based off of someone's currently location. So if I am in Doylestown PA then the block would only bring in news tagged for Doylestown.
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Under review

Google Surveys + paywall integration

Christian Ramirez 10 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Rich Griffin | Product Manager (Product Manager) 10 years ago 3
I would like to see the ability to integrate both Google Consumer Surveys with a paywall. Offering a fallback to customers who would like to opt out of surveys for a subscription fee.
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Fixed Navigation of E-edition Viewer

Alessia Alaimo 10 years ago in BLOX CMS 0
When viewing e-editions on all types of media, is there a way we can make navigation fixed? that way the viewer doesn't have to scroll to the top of page to go to next page?
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Avoid outages: Update your Google, Facebook and Twitter APIs today!

anonymous 10 years ago updated 10 years ago 0

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It's spring, and new APIs are in the air. Google, Facebook and Twitter are updating their authentication procedures, and you may need to take action to ensure that these services continue to work properly with BLOX CMS.We've created a set of handy docs to guide you through the process of updating your authentication settings:

• Our broadcast settings document gives step-by-step instructions for configuring Facebook and Twitter social media broadcasting to use the new APIs.

• Our user authentication doc will guide you through the process of switching to new federated login APIs for Google and Facebook.

Google and Facebook have both set late April deadlines, after which services like federated login and social media broadcasting may fail. Twitter hasn't announced a deadline yet, but why wait? Spring clean your APIs today to sidestep future problems.

In most cases the changes should be painless, but if you have any questions please call TownNews.com customer support at 800-293-9576.

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Election Stats: Bug fixes and feature requests

Josh Renaud 10 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Tim D'Avis 10 years ago 1
I've been trying for over a year in various forums to get TownNews to fix some problems with Blox Election Stats, including a customer service ticket (#567614), but I have received no feedback. Here again are some of the bug fixes and improvements we would like to see:


1. Need a way to specify section tags, or to specify party

I find it strange that candidate assets don't have a discrete field for party. Instead, the Election Stats way is to assign a party is to give the candidate a section tag (ie /elections/party/republican).

But neither the Candidate CSV nor the Race CSV have a field for section tags. So there is no way to specify to which party a candidate belongs when we upload the CSV.

The end result is that we have to go through hundreds of candidates and manually select add party tags, when it could be done all up front in the CSV.


2. Need to fix creation of child candidates from CSV

Say I create a bunch of races and candidates; then I put all their respective UUIDs into a properly-formatted Race CSV; then I upload that CSV to Blox. The race_child candidates SHOULD become associated with the race that I specified. Jason Dean from Madison told me that this used to be the case. But for more than a year, it has ceased working.

The end result is that we have to go through hundreds of races and manually attach all the candidates as children. This takes hours, when it could all be done up front instantly.


3. Broken search

Many aspects of Election Stats search are broken.

For example, if you add a column (ie Right-click a column header, then select "Columns" > "Delete Time"), that column will immediately disappear when you refresh the search.

When you sort by a column other than "title," results on different results pages overlap (ie: Sort by "city" and Page 2 contains multiple results which were already listed on Page 1). I believe that sometimes results are *missing* in this circumstance, as well.

Further, search seems to be limited to only the title/name fields.

Say you wanted to search for all the races which have "St. Louis County" in the "District" field so that you could batch-add the elections/st-louis-county section tag. We can't do it by searching for "St. Louis County." Search doesn't turn up results for things in "District," "Description" or even the "Notes" field, for example.

The only workaround we have found is to concatenate information into the name fields. So, the "Affton Fire Protection District Director" race becomes "Affton Fire Protection District Director+=St. Louis County"

Now we can type "St. Louis County" into "Search text" and find the right races.


4. Not enough batch tools

Okay, after concatenating and uploading a CSV as explained above, we can search for "St. Louis County." But yikes, there's hundreds of races -- and we can only batch-edit one results screen at a time.

Same problem if we want to batch-delete assets. Say you wanted to purge all the races from 2013 out of the system. Yes, you can search by "Election Year," but I would have to delete the 597 races one screen at a time. That means hitting the select-all check box and clicking "Delete" 24 times, instead of just once.

It would save time if the Batch Edit, Unlock, and Delete buttons had submenus similar to Export, with which you could apply those functions to "Selected Assets Only" or "Search Results Only".



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Under review

Using Adobe Muse for creating HTML assets?

Jacki Gray 10 years ago updated 10 years ago 4
Anyone familiar with using Adobe Muse for creating HTML assets?

We found that designing something in Muse and then passing it through Dreamweaver and creating an HTML asset was unsuccessful. It seems like Blox does not like the code or language?

Just looking for input.
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Getting HTML description of collection asset

Matt Connolly 10 years ago in BLOX CMS 0
I am creating a block template that will list mulitple collection assets to choose from.

The description field for collections in BLOX uses a WYSIWYG editor allows you to enter HTML code.

However, when i use mycollection.description or mycollection.content in my UTL code, the text I get has all HTML stripped from it.

Does anyone know how to get the HTML version of the description?
+1
Under review

block description

Mike Stickler 10 years ago updated 10 years ago 4
would love to see all block templates have a description custom property. the description would appear on the site as a short sentence or paragraph in small text between the block title and first asset.