Is there a way to crop image previews in the mosaic block? I've tried adding a preview image and a static preview but only cropping the actual image changes what the way the preview displays in the mosaic block.

As I’m sure you all saw in the update last month, Town News will be disabling the use of PGP encrypted email to capture credit card numbers sometime soon.

We had been using this feature very successfully to capture credit card numbers for entry into Circulation Pro for recurring (Easy Pay) subscriptions.

How are the rest of y’all handling recurring subscriptions?

For those who were using PGP email through Town News forms what is your plan for a replacement?

There were several suggestions in the notice from Town News, but redirecting users to a third-party site to enter their payment information is exactly the type of thing we train consumers to watch out for to avoid being scammed.

Thanks for any and all suggestions and discussion!

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I’m wondering if there is a way to edit the behavior / display of the Section and GeoLocation tags that are displayed in an article footer:

I’m actually hoping to do two different things here.

1. Change the name displayed for a section.

We have several nested sections like “/news/free/“ and the text displayed in the footer for an article there just says “Posted in Free.” It would be great if we could customize it to say something like: “Posted in News” or “Posted in Free News” as that will be much more descriptive than the text pulled right now.

2. Change the URL that a GeoLocation links to.

By default when clicking the Location Tag link the site runs a search for assets that have that GeoLocation tagged: http://www.galvnews.com/topic/?g=seabrook&t=&l=25&d=&d1=&d2=&f=html&s=&sd=desc&s=start_time

I’d like to be able to edit the URL associated with a Geolocation to instead point to a URL that I’ve setup with blocks that run this same filter, e.g. http://www.galvnews.com/communities/galveston

This presents a much cleaner display of headlines without the large search box at the top.

Please let me know what y’all think or if this is already possible and I just missed it.

Thanks!

We have our first ad that's set for a limited number of impressions instead of a date range. The date of the event the ad is for(which I set as the absolute end date) is approaching quickly but the impression limit hasn't been met. But it isn't showing online anymore today. I did some research on help.bloxcms.com and I see that it's spreading it over the course of the ad's start and stop date. I don't want it to do that.

I see this on the help site: "If the scheduled run dates for the ad are MORE THAN 2 years, the Total impression limit will be a simple, hard limit from the start date of the ad."

So does that mean if I set it to end on Jan 1, 2038 it will just run through the impressions as quickly as it can display the ad rather than spreading the impressions? Because that's what I want.

I've got two questions regarding the location/mapping capability in articles:

1) Is there any way to set the zoom level at which the maps will be displayed? Right now the map will always show zoomed out to a sort of regional level, when usually I'd like to show a street or neighborhood location.

2) Is there any way to put the map full width across the article column? I've been using a hacky approach involving an HTML asset to do this, but it'd be awesome to just use the integrated google map.

We're a Flex site, which could make a difference.

Thanks!

Is there a Flex collapsible block option like the one on Zen?

Just a heads-up for those who haven't seen it yet. This would require some code changes to Social Broadcast I'm sure.

Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

The key detail:

"Twitter is currently testing a version of the product in which tweets appear the same way they do now, displaying just 140 characters, with some kind of call to action that there is more content you can’t see. Clicking on the tweets would then expand them to reveal more content. The point of this is to keep the same look and feel for your timeline, although this design is not necessarily final, sources say."

I would love to be able to display the weather satelitte/radar map in different locations than just as part of one tab on the weather index page.

I'd like to be able to embed it in the body of an article, and ideally use it as the lead asset the same way we'd use a photo. In a perfect world we'd be able to set the map options to display on page load (e.g. which overlays; which base layers; present image, past or future loop, whatever).

We're a Flex site. Until recently, I was able to get half way there by putting a flexible iframe around the weather map. However the provider or at least the service changed recently and this approach no longer works.

Doesn't look like it would take much to do, and it would be a big draw when we've got newsworthy weather.

Sometimes our e-edition doesn't allow ads to be clickable(to view them in full size) if they're in the rectangle region of another asset. This was an issue a few months ago but was corrected when an e-edition update was made in BLOX. But now with the latest e-edition update the issue is back. Here are some examples...

In the next example the ad is clickable but only the part that isn't in the region of the main asset.

Feature request for a text alert that sends out a link to our headline mailing list (Flex site). Readers, particularly the next generation of readers favor mobile text notifications over email. Our stats are showing that a small proportion of newsletter subscribers see our emailed newsletter in their inbox, even though they subscribed to it. It would help us reach more readers, more quickly. We would use this very day for general news, sometimes multiple times a day for breaking news & weather alerts etc. Different types of alerts would be possible & could effect most staff in several departments - but particularly our content generators in the newsroom.

Hoping others will like this idea so it is considered for a future release.

We fairly regularly have customers ask to have their ads start at specific times of the day. This most often occurs when they have a short, timed sale. I would therefore like to put in a feature request that the start time & stop time could be set along with the date in banner ads. I am the only one that schedules ads but it would benefit the entire sales dept. by making ads more flexible for customers. Eventually when the ad dept is trained 7 others would use it too.

So we'd like for old calendar events to be deleted after a certain period of time elapses following the final date(or only date if it's a one time event). But to delete an event has to recur. I don't understand why one time events can't be set to delete after a certain period.

It seems to me what would make the most sense would be to say "Delete X days/months/years after the final event date." If the event recurs it would never be deleted until such a time that it no longer recurs. If it doesn't recur it would still be deleted X days/months/years after the last date regardless of whether it's a one time event or has multiple dates.

We are looking to have the ability to view the statistics of individual editorial assets from within the asset window.

1) Having the ability to view the individual statistics for stories will help us sell more in-story ads, be able to tell agencies how many views our stories receive, help writers know what stories are successful and what ones aren’t, and help promote our business by being able to share with those the story was about how many people viewed and read their article.

2) Having this idea implemented would allow us to view not only the statistics on the top 20-100 stories but also be able to see stories beyond the 100 that are viewable. This would help us in the scenarios mentioned above as well as being able to see our success rate on individual stories that are not in the top 100. We have had several people express interest in knowing this information for stories that were not in the top 100 and had to tell them we did not know.

3) We would use this information at least once a month for web reporting and weekly when the writers are looking to see how well their stories are doing.

4) There are about 10 people in our organization that would use this feature.

In the syndication area, after Add to site it would be nice if the asset went into the default workflow.

We're looking into using collection assets because we found the timeline feature which is AWESOME! What would be great is if those collections could be automatically populated with assets based on keywords. For instance if we had the keyword "Donald Duck" as we write stories with that keyword it would be automatically placed into the Donald Duck collection. That way we wouldn't have to remember to manually add assets to collections.

Basically it would be block query rules for a collection asset.