Has there been any thought given to having a time element for how long a block appears on a site?

For example, we have a block on our homepage (as I'm sure everyone does) that displays any stories with the "Breaking" flag attached. However, if we have such a story that we want to draw attention to as breaking news, we only want it to be considered "breaking" for a short period of time, maybe a few hours.

What would be really helpful is if we could have the "breaking news" block appear for a designated period of time instead of having to go back into BLOX or TCMS and removing the "Breaking" flag from the article asset to get the block to go away. It would just take away a little bit of the manual intervention that is currently necessary.

Thanks.

Dave

Here's a funny thing that I just found out in regards to Firebase (Notifier) and Google Maps. Let me know if I'm doing something wrong...

Firebase Spark plan (free) requires no billing account to work.

Google Maps API (free) does require a billing account to work.

What happens to my Firebase project if I add or remove billing accounts for that project in the Google Cloud Console?

If a billing account is added to a project in the Google Cloud Console, the same project will automatically be upgraded to the Firebase Blaze plan if that project is currently on the Spark or Flame plan.
In contrast, if an existing active billing account is removed from a project in the Google Cloud Console, that project will be downgraded to the Firebase Spark plan.

https://firebase.google.com/support/faq/

Any ideas on how to get around this? Right now I had to remove our billing account, so while notifier works, our Maps are coming up blank. I don't want to have to make two separate accounts.

Feature Suggestion: Maybe this exists already and I've just not been able to find it, but would it be possible to track analytics for each article asset, so we can see page views for each article, not just the most popular ones? Thank you!

I'm considering removing Flickr from the social accounts area on the User Profile page. It has changed a lot, been sold to SmugMug, getting rid of 1 TB of free storage, etc. We have very little use of it currently in user accounts.

Is it important to anyone - maybe photographers? - who would still want it?

Join us on March 14th @ 10:30 AM CDT

Introducing BLOX Notifier: A new way to manage social and push notifications

At our March customer webinar, Christine Masters, director of product management at TownNews, will introduce BLOX Notifier—an all-new BLOX CMS application that makes keeping users informed with Facebook, Twitter, BLOX Now App, email, and desktop notifications quicker and easier than ever.

Topics will include:

• An overview of the new BLOX Notifier application
• Using BLOX Notifier to create, schedule, and distribute messages and notifications
• Streamlining your publishing workflow with automated trigger rulesets
• . . . and much more!

Ready to get started? Join us on March 14th at 10:30 AM CDT.

Sign up today.

Want to take in the webinar on your own time? Register now and we’ll send you a link to the webinar recording once it’s ready.

We've had some issues with folks being unable to see the close button in the interstitial promo blocks. The problem is it's impossible to see on the block if it's black in front of an image, or if it's white against a default white background. It can be changed manually via css, but this would need to be changed anytime the layout of a promo block is changed. By adding the "light/dark" option to the close button text in the block options it would make it a quick adjustment that could be done via the admin panel. 

 1) What problem(s) does this idea solve? Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible. Makes it easier for users to see the button and not got frustrated by being unable to close promo interstitial. Would make it easy for administrators to correct small design oversights. . 

 2) How often would you use this feature? All the time

3) How many people in your organization would use this feature? Every site manager and web staff -- appx 12-20. 

One of my colleagues brought this to my attention. I have played around with it, and it seems like a proper bug with the auto-save feature.

User 1: Makes edits to asset, window closes without proper save/close (due to needing to leave/shutdown, crash or whatever.) User 1 doesn't return to asset.

User 2: Makes further edits to asset, even publishes.

User 1: Returns to asset manager. Auto-save restore dialogue pops up. User 1 restores asset. Asset now reverts back to User 1 edits, overwriting everything User 2 did. Text and edits revert, flags and other settings are also reverted, such as the do not publish flag being set again. Even if User 1 selects "cancel," the asset is overwritten.

Has anyone else encountered this? What do you do to get around it? I don't see an option to turn off auto-save (for a short-term fix.) Maybe there should be a warning that there is a newer version available? Options could be:

There is a new version available!

• Discard
• Restore (Overwrite)
• Restore (New Asset)

I manage multiple sites and have multiple tabs open every day on two monitors. 

With the new interface, browser tab titles are longer and often hide the site they belong to (since the sitename is listed at the end of the browser tab title). 

If "Editorial" could be abbreviated to "Ed.", as well as taking out the space before and after the "/", would definitely help clear up some real estate on the browser tab titles. 

Design = Des. 
Community=Comm.
Marketplace=Mkt. 
Statistics = Stats.

If this annoys you, too, please click the vote button below to try to get this changed sooner instead of later. 

Thanks!

When I add a Child Asset to an article, but do not actually drop the Child Asset into the body of the article, I don't like what it does to the alignment of my page: it actually ADDS a "left rail" and shifts the entire text of the article to the right. But the only thing in the "left rail" is an image of that asset I added... so it looks really odd.

This is only an issue on desktop, not on mobile.

It creates an additional problem when I add an Article as a Child Asset to another Article. Now, since I'm in the Parent Article, it's not too much trouble to simply place each Child Article into the body of the Parent Article. But it has now affected the alignment in all of those Child Articles -- because it added the Parent Asset to the "left rail" for each of those Child Articles! So now I have to go back into each of the Child Articles and drop the new Parent into the body of those articles, to fix that alignment.

This is terribly cumbersome and awfully time-consuming, but it's necessary if I don't want most of my articles to be misaligned on desktop view.

The easy fix is to create a default that adds all Related Assets into a horizontal "block" at the end of each article.

Refreshed blox UI really taking off here. One thing bugging us a bit.

-- Searchable assets aren't color-coded anymore

It's just tough to scan thru and easily distinguish, esp pdf vs. img

See attached screenshot. Any suggestions or consideration to reverting back or adjusting?

After a lot of back and forth with support we finally figured out why Infinity Scroll was not working on our main section pages:

"Blocks with infinity scroll enabled won't work with a dynamic setting (section tags set to 'Matches current URL or descendant'). There will need to be a hook set (setting a section, keyword, flag, etc.)."

This limitation does not appear to be documented anywhere at the present time.

This means Infinity Scroll will not work at all on the default Town News blocks that get assigned to every top level URL and all sub-sections (through inheritance) in the system. I assume most customers are using these across most areas of their sites.

Having to work around this will greatly increase the number of blocks needed for a site if they want to use Infinity Scroll on every section front. It could easily scale into the hundreds of blocks needed for a site. Then every time a style change is desired, such as showing the comment count in the summary block, it'll require editing each of those hundreds of blocks instead of the standard dynamic one.

Every single sub-section URL will need it's own block created instead of being able to inherit the blocks from the parent URL.

With this limitation Infinity Scroll is basically dead in the water for large scale deployment.

I really hope Town News is working to fix this but I wanted to post it here for wider awareness because before the answer came back the template developers I was told that there were other sites having the same trouble I was.

I would like to request an infinite scroll feature. When you get to the bottom of one story the next story published in chronological order shows up on the same webpage. This goes on for ever. 

Apple is finally opening up ANF to everyone. We've been pushing an RSS feed to Apple News for a while now, but publishing in ANF will over a more robust experience to readers.

Information on integrating the format here: Use a CMS with News Publisher

Any thoughts on getting BLOX to push out in ANF? There are already WordPress and Drupal plugins available.

It seems an enterprising non-subscriber has found a little glitch to access articles behind the paywall and his instructions are now making the rounds on social media.

Here are the instructions:

"I'm not too sure if I should be posting this. However, as someone who does PC/IT work and repair, I figure I could let some of y'all in on a way to read most of, if not all the article's without paying. (On Android using Chrome) Basically, I go to the article I want to read that is not free. Then I select "Request Desktop Site" in the browser settings. (the three dots on the top right)  Once that loads, (it puts a minor delay on the article loading) all of the article is displayed in its entirety for just a moment or two. A few seconds later the pop up to sign up for a subscription block's it all out. Now it's that small delay, prior to the subscription pop up, that we are after. In that delay, I do a screen shot of the article. (You might have to refresh the page and try again if you weren't quick enough the first time) After I successfully capture it, I then just read it via my picture gallery. If it's longer than my initial screen grab, 

I try a second time and scroll really quick to encompass the remainder of the article with another screen shot. If it's too long for those methods, I do a complete screen record. (video recording of your entire screen) then I go back through the recording and look frame by frame. Hope this helps some of y'all. You're welcome."

We've tested it out and have been able to confirm it works. While it isn't easy enough that I think we'll start losing subscribers over it, it also isn't that complicated to pull off.

I'm actually seeing it pretty consistently even on desktop browsers right now. It seems that the delay before the paywall message appears is much longer than it used to be. It looks like Town News might need to adjust the timing of how things are rendered so the full article isn't displayed until after the user has been evaluated as having an active subscription.

Have any of y'all come across readers doing this or something like it to bypass the paywall?