Welcome to TownNews.com's customer community! Connect with other TownNews.com customers and with us to suggest features, share best practices and ask questions.

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0

Is it possible to exclude an article from search engines?

Geordie 6 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Maureen Reinert 6 years ago 1

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?

+5
Completed

Feature request: Add batch editing of assets within a collection

Dave Ellis 8 years ago updated by anonymous 6 years ago 7

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.

0

Cover art doesn't scale on mobile

Beth OMalley 6 years ago 0

Cover art presentation doesn't "scale" on mobile -- the image doesn't appear at full-width on the mobile screen. That behavior is not documented in the Town News documentation. It would be helpful if all behavior was documented: 

https://help.bloxcms.com/knowledge-base/applications/editorial/assets/article_02c4f17a-65b0-11e7-b196-635adb4dc905.html

0

Calendar success stories

Kevin M. Cox 6 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by David Rouse 6 years ago 10

I'm looking for some examples and experiences from other papers who are successfully utilizing (or gave up on) the BLOX calendar feature of their sites.

Ours is currently empty: https://www.galvnews.com/calendar/

But we're looking to see how hard it would be to jump start it and then of course what opportunities there would be to monetize it.


I'd appreciate any thoughts, examples and/or experiences that y'all are willing to share.


Thanks!

0
Planned

NIE in digital age

Thomas Martinez 6 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Rich Griffin | Product Manager (Product Manager) 6 years ago 7

What are other sites doing with NIE? We no longer deliver papers to schools, instead giving them access to the E-Edition. We recently went to a metered pay wall, and don't want to give a bunch of accounts out. What are you doing? 

Answer

Hi All,

TownNews added official support for IP address white listing early 2019. Here is the help document for it
https://help.bloxcms.com/article_e78ad4b4-41d2-11e9-9e34-2f034444cfab.html
if you have questions our customer service team we be happy to assist.

+6

Feature request: Ability to have separate SEO-only headline

Beth OMalley 6 years ago in BLOX Total CMS updated by Chase Doak 6 years ago 1

It would be great to have an SEO headline field so we could customize headlines for search optimization.

0

Teaser image

Lindy Ritz 6 years ago in BLOX Total CMS updated by Kevin M. Cox 6 years ago 1

If you remove a 'teaser' image from an article in TCMS, and re-flow it up to Blox, it seems that the teaser image won't go away. You actually have to remove it from both system versions. Is that a bug?

0

Is there a most popular block for Email?

Marshall Hopkins 6 years ago updated 6 years ago 2

Or how would you create one out of the headline list block?

+3

Removing flags from stories after a set time period

Thomas Martinez 6 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Alfonso 6 years ago 1

I can't find a solution to this, other than to set a block up to display something for only a certain time. But that still leaves a flag on a story.

I think it would be helpful if we can automate a way to take a flag off a story (for example, keeping a "breaking" flag on a story for only two hours) after a certain time frame, or to set it to last only a certain time frame.

Perhaps there's already a way for this, but I can't seem to find it. Anyone have any ideas?

0

Make all fields in assets in TCMS usable.

Beth OMalley 6 years ago in BLOX Total CMS 0

Feature request:

PLEASE make adjust these additive only fields in TCMS so that they act "normally" and make adjustments to files in Blox as well. If a feature is additive only, it makes it very difficult to actually be useful for clients that use TCMS as their main CMS.

teaser images

authors

delete time/date

0
Completed

Webinar | What's new in BLOX CMS

Cherry Wolf (Marketing specialist) 6 years ago in BLOX CMS updated 6 years ago 1

Webinar recording now avaiable

What’s new in BLOX CMS

Image 483

Become a master of efficiency and automation with the latest updates from TownNews. At our June customer webinar, Christine Masters, director of product management, will highlight the most exciting new features from the latest major release of BLOX CMS.

What’s new:

  • Super batch processing makes it a snap to update a large selection of assets.
  • New promotional button block lets you create dynamic, trackable text buttons.
  • New map vendor give you an alternative to Google Maps, no credit card required.
  • . . . and more!

Ready to get started? Watch it now.

+2
Under review

Feature Request: "Featured" Comments (Comment ID)

Ian McPhee 6 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by anonymous 6 years ago 5

I've submitted a ticket about this but would like to see how many other would find this useful.


We would like the ability to "feature" a comment on pages other than articles. With the increased focus industry-wide on a more engaged journalistic approach, this is something I think all TN customers would find useful. For us, the reader has become much more involved in every step of our writing process. We want to combat the recent "don't-read-the-comments" mantra that has become so commonplace.

Ideally, there would be a block that can pull in or pin Comments just like blocks can with Assets. This would allow us to have various blocks that show the latest comments in every section on the homepage, or every comment in a given section, for example.

I thought this might also be possible somehow by embedding the comment as a "widget". I played around with Google Console and was able to pull the html for a comment and paste that into an html block to pull it in, which obviously isn't ideal for several reasons (if the user edited their comment, that wouldn't be reflected, for example). But I didn't see anything like a "comment id" in the code, or in the Comments feature in general anywhere, which is how I would assume this would be done.

Has anyone done something similar or want to do this as well but can't figure out a way?

0
Under review

Trouble setting up Notifier

Robert Armstrong 6 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Doug Green (Product Manager) 6 years ago 17

I followed the instructions listed here to set up Firebase and connect it to BLOX. But when I send the test push notification, nothing happens. The error in the log says "The caller does not have permission."

I deleted my keys and redid everything from the start, and same thing. Don't know where I should look or what I need to do to get it to work. Anyone have a similar problem, or any ideas on how to fix it?

+1
Planned

Feature Request: Notifier - Inclusion rule: author

Ian McPhee 6 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Christine Masters 6 years ago 3

I got Firebase / Notifier all set up this morning but was disappointed when I got to this window and saw that I couldn't set notifications to be sent based on Author. I don't love the "Follow Notifications" feature, so my plan was to set up each Author as a Topic in Notifier and encourage folks to follow writers that way instead. For now I'm going to use includes: Keyword and have my writers keyword their articles with "#theirname" but I would love to not have to do that. 

Anyone else think this would be useful? I'm submitting a ticket as well.

Image 481

Answer
Christine Masters 6 years ago

This is on our roadmap for Notifier!

0
Completed

Login session cookies that work after a browser has closed

Amanda 6 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Joe Hansen (Product manager) 6 years ago 1

We've had several users complain that they have to keep logging back in to our website to view more articles. The login session cookies for our website last as long as the browser is open but I was wondering if we could get an option to have a login session cookie that lasts for a couple of days or even hours after a user logs in. I know a lot of websites have this capability and I think it would help with our user interface.

Answer

Amanda, this does already exist. You'll need to enable the "remember me" feature for login. I'd recommend setting it to "disabled at users option" which means by default it will be on. Check out the docs here: https://help.bloxcms.com/knowledge-base/applications/settings/users/workspace/article_a8b8751e-2bf3-11e5-a626-df030e819425.html