Welcome to TownNews.com's customer community! Connect with other TownNews.com customers and with us to suggest features, share best practices and ask questions.

Though TownNews.com 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.
+2

display maps on all asset types

Jacki Gray 8 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

It would be great to display maps (defined by location information in the Other tab) on all asset types not just article assets. For example, here we have an image collection of a new temple opening in the area. It would be helpful to readers to see the location on the map.


http://www.buckscountycouriertimes.com/news/local/photos-hindu-temple-opens-in-lower-makefield/collection_168812f2-50c4-11e6-813b-d38b9c063610.html

0
Under review

Has anyone switched their entire site over to SSL yet?

Erica Smith 8 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Donald 8 years ago 3

We're getting ready to do this. Just looking to see if anyone else has, and what, if any, problems or complications they ran into.

+4

Remove/disable the CAPTCHA on a form

Donald 8 years ago in BLOX CMS updated 8 years ago 2

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


A. Having the ability to remove or disable the CAPTCHA from internal forms would decrease from submission time and increase productivity.
Ex. https://www.thehawkeye.com/site/forms/news/content_request/


2. How often would you use this feature?
A. Several times per day.


3. How many people in your organization would use this feature?
Approximately 20 -- any editor, reporter, or photographer.

+4
Planned

FLEX needs more detailed front-end search options - specifically section searching

Nick 8 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Christine Masters 8 years ago 2

Currently I don't see any way to allow users to specify which sections to search. For instance, if someone wants to search for an obituary they can't go to our main site search and say "John Smith" and click something to limit the search results to obituaries.


I can send them to a different page like "/search/?c=obituaries" but usage of the internet trains us to look for a "Narrow my results down" area. I shouldn't have to redirect them to another search page.


It'd be nice to have at least the option to search news, sports and obits. Or you could get fancy and allow BLOX managers to map certain sections tags to custom search options. Like "Map local-news, state-news, national-news to News" and "Map obits to "Obituaries."

+1

​Town News ability to handle major traffic surge

Kevin M. Cox 8 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Aidian 8 years ago 2

I feel for the web staff at The Dallas Morning News. During the shootings last night their primary site just couldn’t take the load. (Their beta site remained online for those who knew about it and had the URL.)


It got me wondering, if one of our sites were exposed to the huge traffic surge from a major national event such as this, would it be able to handle the load?


I’m hoping y’all can share what sort of technology and procedures you have in place for a major spike in traffic. Can things scale automatically or does it require some manual intervention by Town News staff? To what level and how quickly can additional resources be thrown at a problem like this if needed?


Looking forward to any insight that can be shared.

+1

Feature request: Inline notes outside of body copy

Erica Smith 8 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

You can add inline notes to body copy. This works; text marked as a note does not appear in the body. But when text with an inline note is copied into any other field, the inline note shows up. Underlined. And it's not always visible outside unless you're looking at the HTML.


Feature request: No matter what field it's in, hide text that's marked as a note. (In HTML, <ins class="note">historic</ins> would hide the word historic.)

0

Livestreaming?

Adam 8 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Dave Hon 8 years ago 2

Hello I was wondering if their was any kind of livestreaming support for townnews websites? something like how news station livestream their news broadcasts? Maybe its already able to do that. If so could you tell me how?

+2

Would anyone else like to see an engagement button to show an article's full text?

Michael Becker 8 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

On some news sites out there, we're seeing an engagement tactic where only a couple of paragraphs of the story are presented, along with a button to reveal the rest of the text. I assume that button then sends an analytics event that can be used to track user engagement, that is, how many people are interested in reading beyond the first couple paragraphs.


I'd personally love to see this as an item added to the upcoming content discovery/engagement URL custom properties.

+2

Bug in the Blox Go mobile admin and bug during batch edit

Jacki Gray 8 years ago in BLOX CMS 0
There seems to be a bug in the Blox Go mobile admin. When a user makes an edit to an existing asset from the mobile admin and hits save, the asset updates in the database and then reorders the section tags into alphabetical order.

This creates a problem for ad serving (revenue) that works by section tag.


2. Section tags are also alphabetized during the batch editing process. This, too, creates a situation that impacts ad serving and our internal workflow.

+4

Need "important update" option to save for assets other than just articles

Jacki Gray 8 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

It would be beneficial to have the "important update" save work on assets other than just articles. This could be useful for table and html assets. For example, we publish data or stats as tables. In some cases we replace the table with updated information and it would be helpful or the reader to know that new information is indeed available in the table.

0

DFP Unfilled Impressions Flex

Craig V 8 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

Since we launched Flex, we have been seeing high volume of unfilled impressions. I am sure it is because of the class hidden-xs etc, hiding the ad on a small device and not removing it. Anyway to fix this? I am attempting to switch the class names to use visible-sm etc to see if that makes a difference.

+1

Feature request: Have expandable ad only expand once per minute/hour/day but always displayed

Nick 8 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

Expandable ads. Advertisers love them, the majority of us hates them. A potential middle ground could be allow the expandable to auto-expand a set number of times per a set period. We have great functionality to restrict the display of an ad to XX times per YY minutes/hours/days. Is that possible for auto-expand?

+1

Adding a 'date block function' to Blox forms

Christopher K 8 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Maureen Reinert 8 years ago 1

We would like to see a date block function (similar to AdOwl) so people can't pick certain dates for publications.

1. What problem would this solve?

We have a notation under the dates saying there is a mandatory 11 day waiting period, but people still will pick dates within that time period. We then get people complaining because their submission didn't run in the date they wanted (even though it was under the 11 day period).

2. Why the implementation is needed

This would halt any submissions that try to circumvent the required turnaround time from when the form is submitted to when it will run in the publication.

3. How often would it be used

We currently have 6 forms just for our Celebrations publication that is used all the time by people to submit Anniversaries, Weddings, Birthdays, Retirements etc. We also have other forms that would use this function as well (Letters to the Editor, Obits etc.)

4. How many would use this function

These are forms to get information to run in different publications, so multiple people would benefit from this function.

+3

PSA: FLEX uses FontAwesome for its icons

Nick 8 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

This is a two part post. The first part is to suggest a "PSA" topic type for community.townnews.com similar to the "Ideas" "Questions" "Praises." If there's a trick we've learned that isn't template busting or anything it would be cool to be able to share that, especially if it isn't included in help.bloxcms.com. So for the first PSA...


For those of you who use FLEX if you ever want to make use of the text icons you see here and there on your site you can add tons of other fonts. FLEX uses a font called FontAwesome to deliver vector icons. What icons does this include? Check here to see a list of icons: http://fontawesome.io/icons/.


It seems like they only have those listed under "Web Application Icons" and not those included in 4.6. You can even click the icon and it will tell you what code to put on your site.


So if my site had a Harry Potter section and we wanted to include a somewhere we just have to put: <i class="fa fa-bolt" aria-hidden="true"></i>


Have fun!