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.

0
Answered

CSS Class

David_Kemper 2 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Joe Hansen (Product manager) 2 years ago 1

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

Answer

David,

You can use bootstrap 3 visibility classes (https://getbootstrap.com/docs/3.3/css/#helper-classes). You can place these classes in the "CSS Classes" field at the bottom of the "appearance" tab in the Design/Blocks application.

Joe

TownNews Senior Solutions Team Lead

+2

text to speech - build a multi-article player

Eric R 2 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Jesus Sanchez 2 years ago 1

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 :)

+1

Text to talk/audio tool

lmneff 6 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Eric R 2 years ago 1

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.

+1
Under review

More robust tables / Datatables functionality

ShorthornAdam 3 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Carl Appen 2 years ago 2

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/

+1

When you click on an image to preview it in the image asset editor, it expands to maximum size and there's no way to close it via UI. A page refresh is required.

ryan herzog 2 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

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.

+6

Make pasted content plain text by default

Don Willis 3 years ago in BLOX Total CMS updated by Kevin M. Cox 3 years ago 4

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.

0

Workaround for legacy web browsers using townnews admin? It stopped working today

Jerry Lee smdailyjournal com 3 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Kevin M. Cox 3 years ago 5

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

+4

Zoom feature on e-Edition

Barry Hoff 6 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Kevin M. Cox 3 years ago 3

In the new e-edition under FLEX there is no way to make the e-Edition pages larger or zoom in on just part of a page on a desktop computer (once you are in full screen). With the old e-edition readers could use a magnifying glass and zoom in on just the part of the page they wanted to read, making the type larger for those with poor eyesight.


To do that now readers would have to download the e-edition to their computers, find the download and open it in a pdf reader. That's a lot of work for an elderly reader who may know little more about computers than how to navigate a website. Although the reader who brought this to my attention did know how to use Control + to zoom in on webpages (something I didn't know) but sadly that doesn't work on the e-Edition newpaper page ( it only makes the navigation arrows and hamburger menu at the top larger).

+4
Under review

Way to set default workflow for all users?

Robert Armstrong 5 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Tom Houston 3 years ago 4

I know you can set the default workflow on an individual basis, but is there a way (or is it planned if not) to have the option to set all users default workflow, or even set the default workflow upon user creation?

+1
Answered

What's your reaction to User Reactions?

Christine Masters 7 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Kevin M. Cox 3 years ago 17

Hi community people!


Earlier today we had our big BLOX Core update! If you missed the release notes, they are here.


I've noticed a few media sites start using the User Reactions feature. Are any of you thinking of enabling it? Maybe on just a specific section? I'm interested in hearing your reactions or ways to improve it.


Image 234

+12
Completed

More fine-tuned controls on "Buy Now" buttons on photos

Graham R. Archer 7 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Ashleigh Snoozy 3 years ago 7

Hey folks, I submitted an idea to Town News, and they said I should post it here to see if this development idea would help others, too. Anything else think this would be helpful?


The idea is basically to add a few new controls — either on the section level or on specific photo types — to allow editors to turn off the "buy now" button on all mugs, all crime stories, or other examples like that.


Town News asked me to answer these questions:


What problem(s) does this idea solve? Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible.

A: There are dozens of photos used daily on our website that we do not want to sell. Many of these get automated tags that remove the "buy now" button (AP photos, for instance), and that's great. But still a large number of photos get manually tagged with #nosale to keep that button hidden. It would be very helpful to have more specific, targeted and automated ways to blacklist some photos from being sold. For instance, we NEVER want to sell a photo of a criminal who just committed some heinous crime. And a huge number of the mugs we run on our website are handouts that we can't sell, and even the ones that are ours are not any real source of revenue. My proposal would be that we have some ability to turn on/off the "Buy now" button for specific photo types (like all mugs) or sections (so you could turn off sales for all photos attached to stories categorized as crime, for example).

How often would you use this feature?

A: This would be used daily. The automated button removal would impact dozens of stories and several dozen photos each day.

How many people in your organization would use this feature?

A: All online editors would gain from this function, and reporters would no longer have to alert online staff to photos that got missed during the tedious and error-prone manual #nosale application process. Dozens of employees would be impacted.

Answer
Christine Masters 4 years ago

Hi guys!

We have now added more logic to our "automated" photo sales option. See this updated doc:

https://help.bloxcms.com/blox_cms/editorial/assets/article_0f8a8332-27c2-11e8-88a8-5318a95cfee3.html?wewe

We have also added the ability to turn off photo sales per section (via custom properties), as well as batch update photo sales.

Hope this helps!

Christine

+1
Under review

Can we restrict photo purchasing based on "Provided" byline?

Nick 7 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Ashleigh 3 years ago 2

I know the system is set up to restrict photo purchasing through MyCapture to anything with the keyword #nosale. But I'd say about half the time, maybe a little less, the reporters/editors forget to add the keyword. What they almost always add is "Provided" or "Provided photo" in the byline field because typically they're more concerned with making it look good for print.


So if there's a way to do this please let me know. But if not, this would be a really handy feature.

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Answered

Can we send an email reminder to our e-edition subscribers?

internet 7 years ago updated by Kevin M. Cox 3 years ago 5
0
Answered

how do I download a picture from blox cms?

dgrunfeld 3 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Christine Masters 3 years ago 1
+2

Begging you for an autosave feature

jtravis 3 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

Please add an autosave feature. I'm having to redo tons of work when something stupid/unexpected happens and my Blox window closes before I saved. Working in another text editor that has autosave isn't a great solution because it usually means I have to fix every paragraph break in the story once I've cut and pasted it into blox, on top of just adding even more complication to my workflow.