At the moment only related image assets are supported in Facebook Instant feeds. In the future, if the feed supported all related asset types TownNews could correctly integrate the widget as an HTML asset.

Would anyone else find this helpful? It'd allow videos, tweet, FB posts, Instagrams posts, etc to be available in your Instant Articles.

Just wondering if any had any input on this?

Here's the goal: Provide a datepicker interface that will select any date and display a page with all of the assets published on that day, on one page.

Approach 1: Custom search page.

Starting point is something like this: http://www.columbiatribune.com/search/?d=2016-04-09&l=100&app=editorial&type=article

Using the search parameters: http://help.bloxcms.com/knowledge-base/applications/design/templates/modules/by_application/type/search/article_33ecc2fa-6e9a-11e5-b11b-6f69a19d81ac.html

Ideally, we want to put all of a single section's news, grouped with its peers (other articles of the section) and sorted by display priority. For instance, display all of /news/ section and it's children, sorted by display priority. After that, display all of /sports/ and it's children, sorted by priority as well.

You can do this, but you can't do it on one page. You could do all of /sports/ like http://www.columbiatribune.com/search/?d=2016-04-09&type=article&c[]=sports* but you would have to ajax these onto the page in order to display multiple sections.

One way around this problem is to filter the array of search results that you get back.

searchResults = cms.search.results;
articleGroup = tribune_filterAssetsByType(searchResults,'article','include');
newsGroup = tribune_filterByTopSection(newsGroup,'perspectives','exclude'); 
sportsGroup = tribune_filterByTopSection(articleGroup,'sports','include');

Where the filter macros just look for the appropriate sections or type and only return the correct ones. Because you're filtering by priority, this works, because you're not messing with the sorting, you're iterating in order. Behold, a list of assets of a section, sorted by priority, just like we want.

So this works great except for one sort of big caveat: When you have over 100 stories, it's incomplete. You can't return more than 100 search results at once, so you're stuck either ajaxing in the remainder after page load, which requires you writing a second version of your filtering at the script layer to do this... An inelegant solution at best.

Fantasy Approach 2: Using blocks

This isn't possible as far as I know right now. It also avoids all custom programming sorts of stuff and fits right into the "everything is a block" paradigm and that's great. If you had some way to grab url query parameters or read POST parameters out of the page request inside the block query rules, you could do some cool stuff.

Here's an example of how this might work:

In block query rules, you add "Start Date time" rule. In the operation list, there's a "From Request" and then an input to enter the name of a URL parameter.

That's all the user facing stuff that would be needed.

This blows open what is possible with blocks, IMHO. I could build my project above in 15 minutes and be done.

With this and some way to define URL routes and act on them, BLOX becomes a much more powerful framework. Say you wanted to make /archive/2015/ point to a landing page for 2015 or archive yyyy to go to any year's page, but you didn't want to define hundreds of years by hand and thousands of months under them, you need some sort of routing interface and some way to get that routing info into the Blocks.

Only actual approach 3: Using javascript

The search page has a JSON output, with f=json. That means I could load lots of search pages with whatever parameters I choose, parse the JSON, and build a page. Downsides, I need to make a version of card_summary in JS to put the things on the page.

This would be good practice for a native app as well.

It'd be awesome if BLOX allowed multiple people to be working the same asset simultaneously AS LONG AS they were working in separate fields.

For example, one person correcting a headline mistake, another fleshing out body copy and another attaching a photo.

If there was field access, instead of asset access, that would go a long way in helping with big breaking news.

Our guys love posting to BLOX from their phones. But they aren't able to quickly get a link to tweet or FB when posting on the phone like they do on laptop.

We would use this feature A LOT. Everyone in our newsroom would use.

Example: New Orleans Saints sign Drew Brees to new contract. Reporter finds out while on practice field. Needs to file and disseminate news from phone. Can't do latter.

How many times have you wanted to change the wireframe you're using? I've successfully changed non-home pages with no issues. But I know as soon as I switch wireframes on the home page it's going to completely screw up all of my other pages. Has anyone done this? If so how did it affect the inside pages?

This may be for another post but I think something that would really help would be the ability to create regions. How hard would that be for a non-UTL user?

We'd love for y'all to consider a more intuitive BLOX interface (selfishly speaking b/c I"m sure our workflow is different from others) …

-- the ability to search for a story, drop it into a block and re-order the items in the block w/o having to open multiple tabs/individual blocks.

-- Also, could related stories we drag into an asset show up in a related box underneath the centerpiece when the asset is put in that block? Right now we have to manually define centerpiece related stories.

-- Would also be helpful to 'link' block to one another so a story can seamlessly flow from one block to another on a page.

Right now when we change centerpiece story, for example, we have to change the CP, then move that CP'd story -- which is still being widely-read -- into another prominent block on the page.

We would use these features VERY often.

Allow users to upload multiple photos at once via the BLOX user dashboard.

I've uploaded a video several times to BLOX but I can't seem to get it to play on Chrome. I get this error: "The media playback was aborted due to a corruption problem or because the media used features your browser did not support."

It's an mp4 exported with Adobe Premiere using h264. I can't even play it in TCMS.

Has anyone else every seen this error?

Is it possible to change to the HTML 5 version of Flowplayer? If so, will it support pre-roll ads we create through BLOX?

Just curious about this app. I didn't realize it existed until reading about it in another post here.

It doesn't look like there are many publications available in it and it keeps crashing on me when trying to switch to View Page mode.

Is there an option to allow visitors to submit an event without log in?

Also, the newspaper logo at the top is not clickabkle and the nav doesn't work. This is reproduceable. I don't think this is a TownNews issue, but has anyone has a similiar issue?

It only happens when you go to the website from an icon made on the start screen of an iPhone. I have not tried Android yet.

My paper recently went through the FLEX redesign process and is now moving closer to creating a mobile application. We use the TownNews metering platform with a five story limit per 30 days. Unfortunately, I've been unable to find a company that can create a mobile app that will play nice with the metering. Basically, I'd want subscriptions created on the app to translate to our website and vice versa. It would essentially mean having a shared customer database between the two platforms. Does anyone have a setup similar to the one I desire? I would greatly appreciate any information on the matter.

Hey folks, hoping this is an easy one. Is there a way in Statistics to see:

What percentage of our online readers are logged in?

What percentage have an active subscription?

Thanks!