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.

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.

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".

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.

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?

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.

I want to set a query rule on a editorial block to only show assets that are no older then 60 days using Start date/time. Is this possible?

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• Improve your workflow with our all-new inline notes
  
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If you want to search for articles in a specific section it's fairly easy. Put a check next to the section in the drop down and hit search. In addition to this there is an "uncategorized" box that can be checked to bring up instances where there is not section tag.

However we occasionally run into human error issues where something might end up in the section tag field that is not a valid section. For example if no web category is selected in our pagination system then articles will be imported with a section_tag of none. TN gave me a shortcut to search for these (enter tag_section:(none) in the search text), however I'd like to see an "invalid" section search similar to the uncategorized one. The results from this search would return any asset with a section tag that is not currently a valid section tag for the site.

Now that AP Video matching is working, we are in a fix...

Shouldn't AP Video matching only work with AP syndicated articles that are given an 'AP' flag? We are seeing them show up for our local stories as well.

So, that being asked; is there a way to disable 'matching' for certain stories? Can you add a Custom Property in an article asset (like video_matching=false) to disable the automatic addition of the AP video player in that article?

We encountered something yesterday that a local story is getting random videos that have NOTHING to do with the topic; plus that can get hairy if there is inappropriate video/B-roll advertising that plays before a story depending on its topic.

In the content importer it would be nice to have an option in the other settings menu to set the presentation mode of articles that are being imported. We have bloggers only that use the content importer and currently we go back into the articles and change the presentation mode to personality. It would be nice if we could set the mode in the importer for this person and have it assign the presentation mode on import.

Hi There!

I and some other colleagues noted that the Flex templates will use Bootstrap , which can use LESS or SASS http://docs.townnews.com/kbpublisher/Flex-Overview_9180.html#Bootstrap.

Has TN already chosen one or the other for use? Or will there be an option?

Thanks!

For example, If I have over a dozen stories I need in front of the paywall (e.g. Subscription_Bypass), I can accomplish this in one task.  

At this month's webinar, we discussed ways to ensure that your BLOX CMS site and content are search-optimized. Watch it today!