Hello, I'm new to TownNews and Blox so forgive the simple question, but how can I get/find a direct url to an individual asset thats hosted in our Blox (Flex) CMS? For example, if I batch import a bunch of pdfs and then search for them in the CMS, I'd like to be able to add a text link to one of them in another CMS for those viewers but I am unclear what the url is for that specific asset. Thanks for your help!

Getting more and more requests to provide non-employee/non-admin access to review and proof an article (or other) asset.

Creating an admin user with no groups seems like a (less than optimal) work-around.

What are other's doing for this?

We have multiple subscribers asking for the ability to "follow" (receive notifications when assets are posted to) a section. This would enable a notification to the subscriber whenever, for example, a new article is posted in the local sports section. Would your subscribers use this feature if it existed? Have you found a way to use existing functionality to accomplish the same end result? Thanks!

We've noticed lately that to send anything to Blox from TCMS, the process has severely slowed down and the story has to remain in 'Posted' workflow for at least a minute. It used to be that you could save it in 'Posted' workflow, and it was immediately on its way - and so were we.

When did this change? I have not found a release note to verify. It creates hangups - especially when saving with a breaking flag, and it gets in editors' ways when you have to physically wait to ensure the story makes it live into Blox. 

Trying to copy and paste is so frustrating. I would love to see it be cleaned up in two ways:

1. When you're pasting plain text, have what you paste appear right where you left the cursor. Now it creates a return before and after that. I don't understand why. It just makes the process longer.

2. Similarly, when you paste copy taken from the body of an article, can you make it so it doesn't jump that text to the bottom of the window? Again, it's just a pointless thing that slows you down. 

Is there a way to add a presentation mode for a thumbnail only image that does not show in the article body? We would use it for stock images that show on the home page but when you click on the article, it won't show since it is not directly relevant to the article.

We send staff photos into TCMS through a "hot folder" that is processed as a Job on the server. We use several properties there to set the section and workflow depending on the folder used.

Is there a way to have TCMS automatically assign an author to an image through one of these functions? I found the following setting put it doesn't appear to work.

• property_import_author: sets all imported assets to have a specific property. Example 2: property_import_author='jdoe'.

Any help is appreciated.

This is an extension of this old topic that I recently drug back up: https://community.townnews.com/communities/1/topics/625-set-author-on-photo-processed-through-jobs-folder

I just submitted a feature request (Ticket # 742706) for improvements to the parsing of IPTC/XMP metadata of photographs when they are imported into the system via FTP (a Job / Importer) or via the browser interface.

Currently only the following fields are parsed and automatically added to the image asset:

Description/Caption --> Caption

The Title --> Title

Creator --> Byline

Keywords --> Keywords

The highest priority addition we'd like to see is having the "Creator's CI: Email@1, Email@2 (ref2017.1)" or "Iptc4xmpCore:CiEmailWork" field be matched against system users and if found set as the Photographer/Author of the image asset.

An additional request would be to have the "City (Core) (ref2017.1)" field be matched against Geolocations in the BLOX system and automatically adding any that match.

Both of these would save our photographers a ton of time, especially crucial when filing on deadline. Right now they have to open the TCMS browser interface to make these changes whereas if they were done automatically they could avoid that step.

I know making changes to existing behavior won't be as easily considered, but I'd like to suggest changing the IPTC field used to populate the BLOX Byline field.

Currently it is the IPTC "Creator1 (ref2017.1)" field but I think using the "Credit Line (ref2017.1)" field would be more appropriate. The current behavior requires us to put the stylized byline format we'd like to see in the Creator field instead of the photographer's name.

The Credit Line field is the one intended to be used for that purpose:

https://photometadata.org/META-Resources-Field-Guide-to-Metadata#Credit%20Line

Please let me know what y'all think.

Thanks,

Kevin

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We are trying to get a podcast into Apple Podcasts, but have encountered a number of roadblocks. We continue to receive an error message from Apple that it can't "read our feed." A few Town News teams have diligently been working on this for us for several weeks, but we're still unable to get it validated. We are using the podcast player on our site. 

When we reached out to Apple, they said the reason why it can't validate our feed is because it does not have support for HTTP HEAD requests. 

Town News says at this time, it does not believe its the 400 request, partially because it does not allow those requests and it would affect all podcasts. 

Has anyone else ran into this/issues with Apple validating an RSS feed generated through Town News? If so, what worked for you? 

Hi y'all,

For folks here using Facebook Instant, how are you forcing Facebook to update stories from the RSS feed you've submitted?

We notice a lot that a story that's been "Instant-ized" won't update automatically during the day as the story is updated/saved.

Curious to see if there's a solution someone has found. Thanks.

I am sure we are all getting more requests to take down articles that portray people in a bad light. And even though we are loathe to "rewrite history" by pulling stories off the site, we are sometimes sympathetic to people who are followed by minor past crimes like marijuana possession that now show up high on Google searches. Rather than pulling stories down entirely, can we simply exclude specific articles from search engine updates?

Don't know if this is the appropriate means for suggesting an improvement, but here goes. There really needs to be a batch edit option within a collection.

I just pulled in a collection through syndication from the Times-Dispatch that included over 100 images of Dale Earnhardt Jr. Since they were not flagged appropriately, the "Buy now" button was appearing on the majority of images. The images all had varied titles and slugs, so my only recourse in flagging them as AP or contributed was to open each file > select the appropriate flag > save and close.

Easy work, but time consuming and unnecessarily repetitive.

This type of situation happens at least a couple of times per week.

Adding a batch edit function to the collections would be an easy fix.