Many publications now have a splash page from Instagram and I feel like this could be an easy addition in BLOX. We have interns run our Instagram and sometimes a post may be a story from a day or two before. If a reader uses the link in the Istagram bio, it takes them to our front page, however, the story may now be buried and readers may not take the time to find the related article.

What I would like is a splash page. When a reader uses the link it would take them to a BLOX page that just has the images from Instagram. These images would then act as a link to the corresponding story. This would be useful for all aging content and help to get more eyes on stories and less frustration.

I talked to TownNews and there's nothing available like this yet. Have any users built something like this or have any suggestions?

Hello everyone,

We are wanting to set up an online store, selling merchandise such as t-shirts etc for a host of promotional items we run. Currently, we have a https://PRINTful.com account set up this, but it looks like there is no easy way to integrate the API with Blox CMS? 

Does anyone have any other platform they may be using or work around without building out another site with a Shopify account or WordPress? Screen Shot 2019-01-16 at 3.22.29 PM.png

Hey everyone! 

We cut ties with Merlin at the end of last year and have been manually sending PDFs to NewsBank to archive every night, but when we stopped using Merlin apparently the XML feed of stories stopped sending. 

I was curious if any other TownNews entities have anything automated through TownNews to send this feed to NewsBank? Or any best practices to get it from CMS to NewsBank? 

Thanks!

Our staff has decreased dramatically in the past few years and managing manual transactions for digital subscriptions can eat up time. 
is there a plan to add an option to cancel a digital subscription in the user’s dashboard?

What happened to the preference setting that allowed you to upload a batch of photos and have them automatically go live? The pref for newly created items vanished about a week ago. Now, if you upload a half-dozen photos, you have to go through a multiple-click process for each of them to uncheck Do Not Publish. The only alternative is, if they have a common name, to search and do a batch edit, also involving many steps.

you may not want a story to go live, but you can quickly check Do Not Publish before you start populating the story form fields or assigning it sections. Photos are more harmless to have live before the story. And often you're not uploading pix until just before the story goes live, anyway.

Separately, there also have been far more incidents lately where you can upload one or more images from within a story file but they don't link to that story. You have to search for assets individually to find and link -- another, frustrating step on deadline.

Having issues with reporters typing in keywords into BLOX TCMS. They can only use keywords already in and can't create their own. 
However, I can keyword whatever I want as an editor. Any ideas or help? Can i make a keyword list?
Thanks.

With FLEX's reliance on 4:3 and 16:9 cropping it would seem that many photos will end up cropping off the subject in order to adhere to the ratio. And most sites surely have some blocks that pull an asset in 16:9 and others that pull the same asset in 4:3. I propose a quick-crop tool that allows users to select crops for both ratios without the user having to work out the math or upload a previously cropped photo.

I'm thinking something like the image below that would allow users to select the ratio in a dropdown box and blocks would pull the appropriate ratio.

Would anyone else with FLEX use that?

How could I add a CSS class that hides the block on the mobile view?

Be a great idea for a user to create a multi-article playlist, with an audio ad in between each (or every other) article.   The user could then begin listening a playlist of articles.   Kinda like an Amazon 'Alexa' news player, but without the hassle of Amazon :)

Text to audio. Is there a tool we can use with our site that would "speak" our text articles? I've seen this on other news sites. And I am able to get my Alexa Echo to read our website. But wondered about a tool on the site to read articles.

We have been doing more data viz/mapping/database projects lately and it would be great to update the table tool to be more robust, with sortable and searchable data.

Right now we are learning Datatables since it has the functionality we need and can hosted on /app and then iframed in but it would be a lot neater and easier for non-developer types to just be able to add the data without coding up an HTML page and FTP'ing it over.

https://datatables.net/

It's not exactly site-breaking, but one misclick means a whole bunch of finagling and hassle to reopen closed windows in the session. Please make it so re-clicking the blown-up image element closes it or add a close dialog.

I can't speak for other customers, but since 99% of our content is plain text, why not make it so that content pasted into a story asset is -- by default -- plain text?

Then, instead of having a "plain text" button, have a button to retain formatting. Reporters and editors often forget to use this button, which causes code to be hidden in copy until it's ready and on the page, where it can be dozens of characters. That would eliminate this issue.

Has anyone discovered that they no longer can access their Blox admin site with old web browsers?