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Instagram in Broadcast channel
I would love to have Instagram added to the Broadcast channel with the ability to scrape a child asset photo from an article asset. We've found that there's never enough time to take the extra steps to post into Instagram independently.
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Feature request: Allow subscribers to share articles
This has come up before, but was a good suggestion from one of our subscribers via twitter.
Is there a way that would allow subscribers to share articles that would not be subject to paywall? This could turn our subscribers into real ambassadors for our sites. NYT and WaPo allow subscribers 10 shares a month and remind them of that benefit each time they share.
https://twitter.com/FlappyMcB/status/1516470200157224964
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Ability to remove user-facing asset timestamp after a period of time
We'd like to see the ability to optionally set a time for each block that would prevent the asset timestamp from being shown to the public. In other words, we may wish to suppress the timestamp on home page articles once they are older than 4 hours. It may look better to have *no* timestamp than a timestamp that clearly states to the public that we've not made any material changes to the article in x number of hours.
Ideally, this would be an option that could be set individually on each display block.
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Online Merchandise Store
Hello everyone,
We are wanting to set up an online store, selling merchandise such as t-shirts etc for a host of promotional items we run. Currently, we have a https://PRINTful.com account set up this, but it looks like there is no easy way to integrate the API with Blox CMS?
Does anyone have any other platform they may be using or work around without building out another site with a Shopify account or WordPress? Screen Shot 2019-01-16 at 3.22.29 PM.png
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sending an xml feed newsbank
Hey everyone!
We cut ties with Merlin at the end of last year and have been manually sending PDFs to NewsBank to archive every night, but when we stopped using Merlin apparently the XML feed of stories stopped sending.
I was curious if any other TownNews entities have anything automated through TownNews to send this feed to NewsBank? Or any best practices to get it from CMS to NewsBank?
Thanks!
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Jenna,
Yes! We have a built in NITF feed for newsbank and work with them for a lot of our customers. Just submit a Customer Service ticket and we can get that set up for you.
TownNews Senior Solutions Team Lead
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Quick cropping tool for 4:3 and 16:9 for FLEX
With FLEX's reliance on 4:3 and 16:9 cropping it would seem that many photos will end up cropping off the subject in order to adhere to the ratio. And most sites surely have some blocks that pull an asset in 16:9 and others that pull the same asset in 4:3. I propose a quick-crop tool that allows users to select crops for both ratios without the user having to work out the math or upload a previously cropped photo.
I'm thinking something like the image below that would allow users to select the ratio in a dropdown box and blocks would pull the appropriate ratio.
Would anyone else with FLEX use that?
![](/s/cache/86/78/8678fccc68c8a12d52a4416eb9ef3a5d.png)
Hi everyone! We added fixed-ratio cropping tools in our latest release! Check it out!
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David,
You can use bootstrap 3 visibility classes (https://getbootstrap.com/docs/3.3/css/#helper-classes). You can place these classes in the "CSS Classes" field at the bottom of the "appearance" tab in the Design/Blocks application.
Joe
TownNews Senior Solutions Team Lead
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text to speech - build a multi-article player
Be a great idea for a user to create a multi-article playlist, with an audio ad in between each (or every other) article. The user could then begin listening a playlist of articles. Kinda like an Amazon 'Alexa' news player, but without the hassle of Amazon :)
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Text to talk/audio tool
Text to audio. Is there a tool we can use with our site that would "speak" our text articles? I've seen this on other news sites. And I am able to get my Alexa Echo to read our website. But wondered about a tool on the site to read articles.
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More robust tables / Datatables functionality
We have been doing more data viz/mapping/database projects lately and it would be great to update the table tool to be more robust, with sortable and searchable data.
Right now we are learning Datatables since it has the functionality we need and can hosted on /app and then iframed in but it would be a lot neater and easier for non-developer types to just be able to add the data without coding up an HTML page and FTP'ing it over.
https://datatables.net/
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When you click on an image to preview it in the image asset editor, it expands to maximum size and there's no way to close it via UI. A page refresh is required.
It's not exactly site-breaking, but one misclick means a whole bunch of finagling and hassle to reopen closed windows in the session. Please make it so re-clicking the blown-up image element closes it or add a close dialog.
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Workaround for legacy web browsers using townnews admin? It stopped working today
Has anyone discovered that they no longer can access their Blox admin site with old web browsers?
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Zoom feature on e-Edition
In the new e-edition under FLEX there is no way to make the e-Edition pages larger or zoom in on just part of a page on a desktop computer (once you are in full screen). With the old e-edition readers could use a magnifying glass and zoom in on just the part of the page they wanted to read, making the type larger for those with poor eyesight.
To do that now readers would have to download the e-edition to their computers, find the download and open it in a pdf reader. That's a lot of work for an elderly reader who may know little more about computers than how to navigate a website. Although the reader who brought this to my attention did know how to use Control + to zoom in on webpages (something I didn't know) but sadly that doesn't work on the e-Edition newpaper page ( it only makes the navigation arrows and hamburger menu at the top larger).
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Way to set default workflow for all users?
I know you can set the default workflow on an individual basis, but is there a way (or is it planned if not) to have the option to set all users default workflow, or even set the default workflow upon user creation?
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What's your reaction to User Reactions?
Hi community people!
Earlier today we had our big BLOX Core update! If you missed the release notes, they are here.
I've noticed a few media sites start using the User Reactions feature. Are any of you thinking of enabling it? Maybe on just a specific section? I'm interested in hearing your reactions or ways to improve it.
Customer support service by UserEcho