I know every who is manually approving these AdOwl orders has experienced clients requesting receipts because the Approval email is lacking vital information.

This is what our client receives in the Approval email:

————————————

"Subject: Your ad order #7 has been approved

Your ad order #7 has been approved.

The ad will start on Jun 8, 2022, 12:00 AM.”

————————————

Do we see a problem here?

I submitted a ticket to TNews and was told to copy/paste or write into the popup all the information that I needed. This is not conducive for a business to manually copy/paste or write transaction information for every single order "for something that should be already there.”

Some clients cannot submit this to Accounts Receivable the way it is currently written and there is no way to generate a true receipt for them. I currently have to pull up their order and print it as a PDF and email it to them stating that this is all I can produce, all because the Approval email lacks the vital information needed.

I replied back to TNews to gain access to the email template for editing or have them edit the current email to look more professional. I learned that we were not the only ones that have requested this feature and to submit a request ticket since they were unable to give me access to the template or make the changes required.

Below is a sample of what the default Approval email should look like.

—————— sample ——————

Hello (First Last Name shortcode),

Your ad order ID (ID# shortcode) for the amount of ($ amount shortcode) has been approved and will start on (order start date shortcode) and will end (order end date shortcode).

Please keep this email receipt for your records

Thank you,

(Business Name Shortcode)

(Contact Number Shortcode)

————————————————

As you can see the above format covers:

• Client/Business Name
• Order #
• Cost
• Run Start Date
• Closing statement
• Business Name (Branding shortcodes)

I truly believe all your clients would love it as well because it covers all the vital information needed for a receipt and cuts down on the wasted labor hours making a custom approval email.

Note: Upon writing this I found a similar post dating back 5 years and I was flabbergasted to learn that it was still under review.

I've had a feature request open about this since last May (Ticket 666975) but wanted to get some public visibility on it as well. The addition of BLOX Notifier actually makes the situation worse and I have some good example images to share.

There are now two different ways to automatically send emails upon specific conditions in BLOX and both of them lack the customization ability needed to maintain a newspaper's brand and achieve specific goals.

First are examples of what our current breaking news emails look like, but they have to be sent manually through Email Reach's "Single Run." They maintain the style of all our other email newsletters and meet branding goals at the expense of being a manual process that gets forgotten at times.

Automatic Alerts for BLOX Email Reach

https://help.bloxcms.com/knowledge-base/releases/software_releases/article_618ad806-8df5-50cc-9e51-45980a69c21d.html

This option has been around for a couple years and allows filtering that most papers would need, however there is no ability to customize how these emails look. You are stuck with the examples below.

BLOX Notifier

https://help.bloxcms.com/knowledge-base/releases/software_releases/article_3cbfbd8a-a89f-5ac0-ad3c-1a37108b5ac8.html

I was hopeful the newly released BLOX Notifier would bring some improvements but unfortunately it is even worse. Emails produced by it are completely void of branding and most other useful information.

Does anyone else have subscribers that are experiencing issues with the eEdition where they go into it and they just get a white screen? We've got about 15 now. Tried different browsers tried resetting passwords. Development is looking at it but I didn't know if it was just us. 

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.   

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

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.

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

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!

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?

How could I add a CSS class that hides the block on the mobile view?

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 :)

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.

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/