I've been trying for over a year in various forums to get TownNews to fix some problems with Blox Election Stats, including a customer service ticket (#567614), but I have received no feedback. Here again are some of the bug fixes and improvements we would like to see:


1. Need a way to specify section tags, or to specify party

I find it strange that candidate assets don't have a discrete field for party. Instead, the Election Stats way is to assign a party is to give the candidate a section tag (ie /elections/party/republican).

But neither the Candidate CSV nor the Race CSV have a field for section tags. So there is no way to specify to which party a candidate belongs when we upload the CSV.

The end result is that we have to go through hundreds of candidates and manually select add party tags, when it could be done all up front in the CSV.


2. Need to fix creation of child candidates from CSV

Say I create a bunch of races and candidates; then I put all their respective UUIDs into a properly-formatted Race CSV; then I upload that CSV to Blox. The race_child candidates SHOULD become associated with the race that I specified. Jason Dean from Madison told me that this used to be the case. But for more than a year, it has ceased working.

The end result is that we have to go through hundreds of races and manually attach all the candidates as children. This takes hours, when it could all be done up front instantly.


3. Broken search

Many aspects of Election Stats search are broken.

For example, if you add a column (ie Right-click a column header, then select "Columns" > "Delete Time"), that column will immediately disappear when you refresh the search.

When you sort by a column other than "title," results on different results pages overlap (ie: Sort by "city" and Page 2 contains multiple results which were already listed on Page 1). I believe that sometimes results are *missing* in this circumstance, as well.

Further, search seems to be limited to only the title/name fields.

Say you wanted to search for all the races which have "St. Louis County" in the "District" field so that you could batch-add the elections/st-louis-county section tag. We can't do it by searching for "St. Louis County." Search doesn't turn up results for things in "District," "Description" or even the "Notes" field, for example.

The only workaround we have found is to concatenate information into the name fields. So, the "Affton Fire Protection District Director" race becomes "Affton Fire Protection District Director+=St. Louis County"

Now we can type "St. Louis County" into "Search text" and find the right races.


4. Not enough batch tools

Okay, after concatenating and uploading a CSV as explained above, we can search for "St. Louis County." But yikes, there's hundreds of races -- and we can only batch-edit one results screen at a time.

Same problem if we want to batch-delete assets. Say you wanted to purge all the races from 2013 out of the system. Yes, you can search by "Election Year," but I would have to delete the 597 races one screen at a time. That means hitting the select-all check box and clicking "Delete" 24 times, instead of just once.

It would save time if the Batch Edit, Unlock, and Delete buttons had submenus similar to Export, with which you could apply those functions to "Selected Assets Only" or "Search Results Only".

I am creating a block template that will list mulitple collection assets to choose from.

The description field for collections in BLOX uses a WYSIWYG editor allows you to enter HTML code.

However, when i use mycollection.description or mycollection.content in my UTL code, the text I get has all HTML stripped from it.

Does anyone know how to get the HTML version of the description?

I want to set a query rule on a editorial block to only show assets that are no older then 60 days using Start date/time. Is this possible?

Now that AP Video matching is working, we are in a fix...

Shouldn't AP Video matching only work with AP syndicated articles that are given an 'AP' flag? We are seeing them show up for our local stories as well.

So, that being asked; is there a way to disable 'matching' for certain stories? Can you add a Custom Property in an article asset (like video_matching=false) to disable the automatic addition of the AP video player in that article?

We encountered something yesterday that a local story is getting random videos that have NOTHING to do with the topic; plus that can get hairy if there is inappropriate video/B-roll advertising that plays before a story depending on its topic.

In the content importer it would be nice to have an option in the other settings menu to set the presentation mode of articles that are being imported. We have bloggers only that use the content importer and currently we go back into the articles and change the presentation mode to personality. It would be nice if we could set the mode in the importer for this person and have it assign the presentation mode on import.

Hi There!

I and some other colleagues noted that the Flex templates will use Bootstrap , which can use LESS or SASS http://docs.townnews.com/kbpublisher/Flex-Overview_9180.html#Bootstrap.

Has TN already chosen one or the other for use? Or will there be an option?

Thanks!

For example, If I have over a dozen stories I need in front of the paywall (e.g. Subscription_Bypass), I can accomplish this in one task.  

Quick question:

Could the CSV job (or another job type http://docs.townnews.com/kbpublisher/Job-Overview_5506.html) be used to import files as table assets?

Thanks!

I just wanted to see if anyone had some samples of Timeline Collections they'd like to share.

I'd enjoy seeing how other papers have utilized this functionality and any thoughts or comments you have about this presentation mode.

Thanks!

hello i was wondering if there is a custom property that will allow the minilist asset have two columns instead of just one big long one?

Why does our mobile touch 5 pages bounce the user back to the top? I know it may have to do with everything not fully loaded as you scroll down but this does not happen on desktop version.
http://m.buckscountycouriertimes.com/mobile_adv/

Hopefully I'm just missing it, but is there a way to have the BLOX system verify an email address is legitimate as part of the new user signup process?

Currently users can create an account with any email address they want and there is no verification required to prove that use actually controls that email. This creates a potential issue with trying to use Domain based Subscription Services since we aren't actually verifying that someone has a real email in a particular domain.

I can't remember the last time I've used a service that didn't require verification so I'm hoping we can enable it for our site.

Is it possible to set settings > urls application to "Form" with a application skin of "Touch 5 Mobile"? I know once our site is responsive then it won't be a problem, but until then I would need an option for this.

I'm wondering if it's possible to make the masthead presentation mode for photos to be centered when it's placed on a long-form story. Right now, if you use a masthead photo on a long-form story, it floats left. However, the headline is centered, so it looks off. You can get around this using the "showcase" presentation mode for photos, which spans it across the whole page, but it adds the title of the image and grey lines on the top and bottom of the image. It would be nice to display above-the-headline photos that look clean. We used to be able to do this before with the "panoramic" presentation before it switched to an actual swiping panorama. It displayed the photo cleanly above the headline with the credit and cutline.