Local organizations have contacted us about integrating their calendars with ours. They have been able to accomplish this with other local news sites. This would allow them to post the event to their calendar and it automatically appears in ours. Since most modern calendaring software supports the iCal format (as does Town News), would it be possible to integrate approved calendars? I understand we can currently import iCal, however making this more automated would be beneficial for both us internally and our community contacts.

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We’ll show you how to:

• Create eye-catching article intros with our all-new Cover Art feature.

• Bounce back when your browser crashes while editing with our new auto-save functionality.

• Boost user engagement with the new, mobile-friendly Vertical Gallery presentation mode.

• Use automatic ad placement to lift revenue from article pages.

• Keep your site’s tags up-to-date with Google Tag Manager integration.

• . . . And lots more!

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So we've got one block in which we want to display a story which will be randomly selected from a list of stories.

We've got a second block where we want to display the remaining stories from that list -- but not the one selected to display in the first block.

Does that make sense?  And how to do it?

Is there a way to grab all the "author bio" information we put in Blox user areas and pull it into one coherent page? Like is there a block that we can pin author assets to to create a "meet the newsroom" page of some sort?

Our page curl ad isn't displaying correctly. It jumps around and shifts behind the curl. I'm used to the curl revealing an image that doesn't bounce around. Check out the video and let me know if any of y'all have similar issues.

I found a video that demonstrates how I think it should work. Notice how the ad graphic doesn't shift. It just fades from the small ad to the large ad.

We like the new article designing functionality, but notice that we lose the sharing tools for any longform. So our best stories become the most difficult to share. How about larger, persistent share buttons along the left edge of longform stories?

I'd like to know how many unique viewers are using one, two, three etc. free visits and how many hit the subscribe button at some point.

Currently, it appears that the CAPTCHA in the forms in Blox CMS are just an image. Is there any audio or other alternative for sight-impaired users?

I've looked through the improvements to the API where you can create and update editorial assets, which is great!

However, I found no way to get, update or create table assets, though I can retrieve existing ones and create (empty) table assets.

Is there a way (or a plan) to provide this in the future?

Are there plans to allow AdSense ads in AMP templates? https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-ad

I am writing in regard to the Teaser field on the asset editor and asking another field be added — the social teaser. We are currently on Zen and when we move next month to Flex, we will lose one of the best uses of the Teaser. Right now, since Zen isn't completely supported by Teaser, when I add an image to Teaser its image shows up in the OG and Twitter tags for that asset(article). But, it does not show up as the thumbnail preview on the public facing home or index pages and it doesn't show up on the article page. That's fabulous.

Sadly once we move to Flex, the Teaser content, my understanding is, will show on the site's public-facing side on the index and home pages. Boo!

We aggressively use social images created in Adobe Spark to promote content in FB and Twitter. We often use these on stories where we have no art and on stories where we can make it more interesting in social media. But, there aren't really the type of images that make for good on-site thumbnails. 

My usage of these promo images, which have no place on the story page either, really help spur forward user engagement. So, what I'm asking for is another tab called Social Teaser that acts just like Teaser except it isn't used for thumbnails — the social teasers url is passed only for social media. We want these images to come up when people share.

The hierarchy then for OG and Twitter tags would be

Social Teaser

If not, then

Teaser

If not, then

Article image

If not, then

Default image as stored in settings.

I hope you'll consider. This is a concession to the idea that like all platforms, social needs content built for it and that should be supported in the CMS. You can see by the images shared above these look strong in social media, but really don't have a place as a thumbnail. If there's already a way to achieve what I'm asking, please let me know, I didn't see it in documentation. Web editors, please vote up this idea, and if you want to learn more about this technique reach out to me at webeditor@sfnewmexican.com

Thanks for your consideration. 

Henry M. Lopez

Digital Enterprise 

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Hey folks, anyone know of ways to further tweak paging gallery display options? For instance, it'd be cool to have the numbers be reversible (count down, rather than up), hide the numbers or make the photo credits have a lower profile (they're pretty prominent). Wasn't sure if those settings existed, but if not, would be a cool one to put on the radar. Be nice if you could just add a #reverse keyword to a collection and have it count down, for instance.

Join us on August 3rd @ 10:30 AM CDT

At our August customer webinar, we’ll take a deep dive into the numbers that are influencing the news industry today, and explore the concrete ways our solutions can help you thrive in an evolving marketplace.

Here are just a few of the topics we’ll cover:

• How many visitors block your ads? How should you respond?

• More than half of web traffic is mobile . . . What BLOX CMS features can help you serve up a great multi-screen user experience?

• How can you use audience targeting to boost revenue from both drive-by and loyal users?

• Which social media platform delivers the most traffic? Are you optimized for social?

• How can our new collection types—we offer more than a dozen—help you create compelling multimedia content?

• . . . and much, much more!

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I've seen a new ad movement where the user is on a website and they decide they want to navigate away. So they move the mouse outside the web page to click a bookmark or type in a URL. But they're attention is interrupted by a popover window!

Sometimes this can be annoying but I saw a really good implementation of it. On the LA Times' website they offer 4 weeks for 99 cents. Nice deal. But I don't want to subscribe today. I'll shop on Amazo...What? A window just told me I can get 8 WEEKS for 99 cents!

That's an awesome way to close the sale when someone decides to pass on the initial offer. As this seems to be a trend I would think it would benefit BLOX customers. So is that something any of y'all could use?

The TCMS "trim for print" feature is nice for stories that need to lose an inch or two for print, but can run in-full online. But the opposite would be nice, too.

This would alleviate some problems, starting with pesky date issues. If print wants to run "today," they could, while online the date would remain "Wednesday" or "Feb. 17" or whatever style was desired. ("Today" in print is often not "today" online — the publication date online is generally a day earlier.)

This also would help when trims made for print cut parts of sentences or paragraphs. It's easy to lose or move the first reference to a person or place when trimming content for print. This feature would allow the complete sentence or paragraph to stay online, and a print-only version of the sentence or paragraph to be written for print.