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Looking for author and byline field for collections
We are setting up Google Data Studio dashboards for reporters and editors. However collection assets don't roll up under reporter totals because they don't have author/byline fields available.
Auto-posting of weather warnings and advisories?
What are people using for online merchandise sales?
We have been slowly working through the process of getting approval at our university for online sales, and have gotten the ok to use our merchant portal to sell stuff other than subscriptions. (This isn't a TownNews issue, btw -- this is the issue we face for being a newspaper that operates as an agency of the university). So we're interested in setting up an online sales portal for merchandise.
Absent building one ourselves, are there third parties that other TN newspapers are using for sales? This doesn't have to integrate with the site other than being able to access our credit card processor. Any suggestions are welcome.
Anyway way to preview pinned assets in blocks that haven't been published yet?
We're trying to transition to a more curated homepage with our editors manually pinning stories to blocks. The goal is to have the homepage feel like a bespoke document everyday.
I've setup multiple layout schedules for each day of the week so that editors can plan out what future layouts will look like but it's difficult for them because if they pin an article to a block that has not been published yet (but is scheduled to be published by the time the layout schedule is active) it will not display that asset in the layout editor. They have to select View Site > Preview at a specific time.
Is there anyway to preview the site at a specific time within the layout editor? Or a way to force the display unpublished pinned items in the layout editor? Or another strategy worth considering for putting together daily, bespoke editions of the homepage?
Better way to auto populate venues in BLOX calendar tool?
Giving the BLOX calendar tool a try on our website. Disappointed to see there's no good way to help auto-populate a venue from biz listings in an event asset outside from the 10-15 I'm told we could store in the venue library. What can we do to find a better workflow for this? We're talking about several hundred event listings per week in print pulling from thousands of biz listing entries.
Hey Kyle!
The Business Directory can be used as a "business hub" without using it on the front end. This way, you can associate Calendar events with venues, and businesses with banner ads, and so forth. Personally though, I would look into the Calendar upsell functionality - it's a great reason to get the full directory.
The venue library in Calendar is meant to be a "quick list" of your most commonly used businesses. You can have more than 10 - 15... there is not a physical limit it's just more that at some point it becomes unwieldy. It does put listings in alphabetical order and allows for type-ahead. But it isn't meant to be a database of listings.
But in general, I would use the Business Directory for most listings, and then the venue library for the ones you're using like every day to save you a few clicks. The venue library is useful for when you're entering things in manually.
Hope this helps!
Keyword Tag Links
Feature Request - Ability to edit the keyword tag links. Instead of clicking the keyword tag and having it go to a generic search page what if it could go to a link you tell it to. For instance you are running an article on garage sales, well why not have that key word link to the classifieds section for garage sales.
Restrict site search utility block to a specific URL/tag
I want to create a microsite on my main website. And I'd like a search block on that page that will only search assets on that specific URL. I can't do that with the "Utility: Site Search" block. I can do that with the "Utility: Site Search Range" block but I'm forced to also include a date range. It would be fine if it defaulted to "any day" but it doesn't. You have to actually set it to "any day" or it will search a smaller time frame. So it seems like the range block has an option the regular block doesn't. Can this be fixed?
Hey Nick,
Both the "Utility: Site Search" and the "Utility: Site Search Range" have a search URL override option.
If you don't see it - perhaps you have a customized version because we did add the Site search version after the Site Search range block.
Note that by default our system will look for the FIRST search-based URL that it sees in order to perform a search. I believe that if this happens we have ways to fix it in all cases now, but if you have a situation where you create a special search URL for "archives" and then find that obits is now re-directing them when you search - then you need to go through and force the other searches into the alphabetically inferior URL.
And, this works really great for obits! The Search Range block was actually specifically made for obits. Firstly, our testing shows that many obits users just want to browse to the last few days of obits, so that's why the ranges are set up that way. And, search is very popular in obits, so having a separate search URL can help with a few things:
1. You can set up your search to be obituaries/search. This way, all of the search traffic actually stays within the obituaries umbrella so you can track it together in terms of analytics.
2. You can assign specialty ads to the search pages, separately from your other search pages. So, you can sell an obits package that gets impressions on the obits index page, article pages and search pages.
In theory, you could do this with recipes as well.
Let me know if you still can't find this and I can look at your site.
Weather inconsistency
We just had a reader point out this inconsistency and I'm wondering if anyone else has ever noticed it on their site. In particular this is with the Email Reach | Email: Weather today block.
I've checked past emails and it seems to be consistently in disagreement with itself. Note the high temperature of 102 in red under the graphic and compare it with the "Highs in the upper 80s..." right below it and the "High 89F" in the text forecast at right.
Print view shows ads on FLEX
Someone just alerted me to the fact that when you click the print icon in a FLEX article the printout includes all of the in-story ads AND any hovering ads. The hovering ads are on every page, usually blocking content.
With Zen when the user clicked the print icon they were taken to a page with "?mode=print" trailing the URL. This mode stripped all of the other elements of the page save for the story and any child assets. It was great.
Here's what FLEX printing looks like...
Package Blocks
Present breaking news or enterprise projects with new "package" block
Once y'all start using this new block on your site I'd love to see some samples. Please share them here if you remember!
Webinar | Google News Initiative fundamentals training for BLOX CMS
From reverse image search to trends and alerts, this course teaches practical skills for reporting in the digital age. Nicholas Whitaker, training and development manager for Google News Lab, presented a Google News Initiative fundamentals crash course specifically for BLOX CMS users.
Topics included how to:
- Finding stories and terms gaining attention.
- Giving important context by building interactive maps.
- Checking the authenticity of an eyewitness photo or video.
- . . . and much more.
Ready to learn more about Google News tools? Watch the recording now.
Upgrade needed in system
Please add the capability of embedding from DocumentCloud.org. They have developed powerful journalism tools that go beyond the usual PDF. Thank you.
Does anyone have experience with VisionData for online subscriptions?
We currently use VisionData for our home delivery circulation management. The intent was to switch online subscriptions over to VisionData too. I'm hesitant to make this switch because it will undoubtedly cause a massive drop-off when everyone who was once on auto-renew has to set up a new subscription in a different system. Their support has also never been stellar. Does anyone here have experience using VisionData for managing online subscriptions?
Feature request: URL/titles for SEO
Instead of URLs picking up an asset's title then generating new URLs when titles are changed, could we consider an SEO title field where an editor could manually define a phrase that would appear in a URL? And the URL wouldn't change as the asset's headline changes?
Example: Story about mass shooting in Baton Rouge
SEO/URL title: Baton Rouge mall shooting
Article asset title: 5 dead in Baton Rouge mall shooting
URL (that wouldn't change): theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/baton_rouge_mall_shooting/XYZABC123.html
Right now we shy away from opting for titles in URLs b/c of the mess it creates with multiple URLs per asset.
This would be used very often by us.
Hi guys!
We had a release yesterday which added part of this feature, but it doesn't do everything that is discussed here in this first version.
But, for now, we see two use cases:
==> 1. Publisher has a bad or short title on their article, but they want to be able to expand it in the URL.
So maybe, for some cutesy reason the title of the story is "M13," so your URL would look like this:
https://flex-showcase.bloxcms.com/m/article_32d040a8-43f5-11e8-944f-57cba1de66fc.html
Note that we automatically remove numbers, because they are more likely to change, so you end up with a stupid-looking URL basically, with just "m" there!
In these cases, you may want to be able to change the title or change the URL so that you can create something that is more SEO-friendly, and also user friendly (if you share the "m" URL above, it doesn't have any good keywords or let you know anything about it).
Buy with this URL title feature, you can go in there and type something that can be used instead. So you end up with this:
Note that it allows the number to be in there, so that makes things more clear in some cases (like m13 where you need that for SEO, really).
Note that, in theory, it could go the other way as well. You might have a page that has a long page title, but you wanted it to be shorter or more precise (again, for SEO and for usability), you could do that also.
==> 2. Publisher would like their URLs to remain static so it doesn't mess up statistics or other external services such as Facebook comments.
In this situation, it's more that you want the URL to remain the same for statistics, rather than that you want to "fix" it from some unattractive state. The new feature is meant to address the situation above, but it is not likely to fix the statistics issue.
A few thoughts there:
Firstly, software like Chartbeat and Parsley can be updated to key off of the article UUID instead of the URL.
This will mean that they will all be tracked together regardless of section or title change.
Secondly, we are looking at doing some kind of permanent URL that would remain frozen, but we haven't agreed yet what that would look like.
Wordpress has a little Edit button that allows this (like Kevin's example). Basically, after the title is written, a few seconds later it populates the "permalink" slug area. If you edit it after it is published, it creates a 404 (that you can fix if you create a 301 redirect manually, it sounds like).
So, in our situation, we could possibly do something like that...
The problem is that BLOX is a little different because many users will actually write content in BLOX that may span many days. It is common that you see an asset in the system that has a start date of 2037 and the title is "Second story about the mayor TK" or whatever. So, in those cases, you'd theoretically end up with that in your URL, even if you change your title later.
It is possible we could tie the URL creation to a workflow status... i.e. it doesn't auto-fill the URL until it its a publish state, and then it freezes.
I have also seen some CMSes where they will have a "generate URL" button that, when pressed, will generate the URL and freeze it.
Interested to hear your thoughts...
More robust BLOX Go
The BLOX Go feature is descent, but it is really lacking in functionality. There are several things we'd like to see that would improve this feature:
• Would like to be able to fill out more of an asset's fields. As it stands we can only fill out the Title and Caption fields for an image or video asset, and Title and Content for an article asset. Would like to have, at the very least, the Byline and Slug fields available for all assets in Blox Go, and be able to select Flags for images and videos.
• Ability to modify other assets besides articles. Seriously, this is a major flaw in the system. We can upload images and videos, but once we've done so we can't edit them. This means that if we upload an image from the field and there's a misspelling in the caption, we can't edit it unless we do so through the regular CMS site (not BLOX Go), which is absurdly clunky use if you're trying to do so on your phone.
• I know I'm asking a lot here, but it would be awesome if article or photo assets created with BLOX Go (or in CMS in general) could somehow "write back" to TCMS. Say I upload a photo from a house fire from my phone in CMS. It would be nice if that also created an asset in TCMS that could be used in our print workflow. As it stands we need to create a separate asset in TCMS if we want to use that image in print.
If any of these features are already available, please do let me know.
Thanks,
Brad
Hey Brad!
I wanted to let you know that BLOX Go is a major initiative for us this year. In fact, we're totally re-doing it!
Coming soon, it will be re-released with an entirely new UI that is a lot more flexible.
In this first version, we are focusing on changing the UI elements and not adding a ton of new functionality. For our first version we're striving for feature parity with the existing interface. But in subsequent versions, we will add much more functionality, including having access to more fields, more asset types and eventually, more BLOX CMS applications.
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