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Instant Articles
Now that Facebook instant articles is live for all publishers, can you update how we incorporate this into the BLOX system.
Hi Paul! We are working with two papers to do a live test before releasing this to all sites. We've already had to make several updates to our Facebook Instant Articles feed based on our first live tests. But, neither of the two papers have been approved. Once that happens we'll do an announcement. :)
Force Facebook to use the default og_image instead of child image?
It is election season which means we are running a bunch of stories with multiple politician mugshots attached.
Someone pointed out that we may have a potential problem when Facebook displays only one of these on the article preview. As I’m sure you all know, somebody out there is going to take that as us favoring one candidate over the other.
Is there an easy way to prevent Facebook from pulling a child image in a case like this, or make it use the default logo instead?
Any thoughts anyone has are definitely appreciated.
I'm not sure if there is a way to do this in Facebook (usually the first person to share the page can choose the main image, but I'm not sure how long that will stay that way for subsequent shares).
We have a feature we're working on where you can upload a different image to be used for the preview, and it would be used for the Facebook og_image as well. So, that may help when that's available.
For now, I would say that lots of papers just make a combined image with the various candidates all represented, and then that single image would be used as the main image on the story (and thus also the og_image).
Collection Series clipping headline
This one looks like a bug to me.
On a Collection Asset, Series style, long headlines are being clipped when there is plenty of space to display the whole thing.
Is this somehow intended behavior?
Hi Kevin!
Your file was customized and hadn't been updated. So our developer updated that bit of code on your site. Let me know if it looks better now.
Thanks!
Christine
Add map/location to HTML assets
We have several HMTL assets that could benefit from using the location feature. Is this something that could be added?
Embracing HTTPS - NYTimes.com
Interesting article from the NYT. I'm curious to hear what everyone thinks.
We're already moving this direction with our non-Town News sites and wonder what challenges we'd encounter trying to go all HTTPS on Town News?
Bug in event time display in calendar block template
The block template called "Calendar: Event list (flex)" has a bug and displays "12 am" for the "time" rather than "all day" as it does on the asset detail page.
We can not present inaccurate information like so. Can we get this fixed in the template?
Here is a sample Calendar detail page with correct "all-day" information:
Hi Jacki!
We're already aware of this issue and have a fix planned. Thanks!
Phil
Join us | Spring cleaning 101: Easy tips for optimizing your BLOX CMS site!
Spring cleaning 101: Easy tips for optimizing your BLOX CMS site!
We'll cover:
- Keeping your site up-to-date by cleaning out old blocks, auditing your admins and evaluating your ads.
- Freshening up your front page with new display blocks.
- Making sure your site is mobile-ready and search optimized.
- And much, much more! Join us on Thursday, May 5th at 10:30 AM CDT.
We need a way to HIDE live forms on the forms page
I can't tell you how many times I've designed a form that I want live but hidden on the "Site Forms' page. Not every form needs to be listed there. We can send links to the people who we actually want to fill out the forms. It would also enable us to test forms without the general public knowing they exist. And you may think "Nobody will ever go to the site forms page and see this form" but people always seem to find the areas of our site we never expect them to find.
As the form manager is now we have the option to "Disable." I would like to see an option "Hide" which would just hide the form's existence from the "Site Forms" page.
Hi Nick,
There is a way to make this happen currently.
- Go to the block editor for /site/forms
- Open the form index block and and in the appearance tab content fieldset add "/site/forms" the the base url setting. This setting limits the links displayed to only those that are assigned to that base url.
- Create a url in the url map that can be used to assign forms to that you don't want displayed and assign the forms skin to it. Instructions for setting up a url and assigning a skin to can be found here LINK
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- open up the form you want not to display and assign it to that url in the properties>General tab>url setting. You can see how to assign a form to the url you created here
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The forms assigned to the second url will not display in the form listing on the site forms page and you will be able to provide a link directly to any of the forms there as well.
Best Regards,
Do views of embedded YouTube videos count?
When we embed a video by first linking to it as an asset on our Town News site and then placing it on an article as a child asset, do the views count in YouTube?
Facebook refuses to pull child images
I've been fooling with this all morning. I'll paste a link in and it gives me either our logo(which is set as the og_image on our site). I deleted that from the back-end because I never want that to show. Then it gives me the second child image. I want the first. So I set the second to "Do not publish" just to test it. THEN it shows the first child image. For crying out loud, why is this? And I'm not talking about an image the size of a fav icon. These images are in the range of 1296x864+. I know Facebook is particular about the size of the images. So it seems like for whatever reason Facebook only sees one image.
Here's one of the pages that refuses to display an image for Facebook: http://www.coastalillustrated.com/columns/community_notes/article_1f806700-eab3-11e5-b9ad-1b2a31f86771.html
Absolutely nothing comes up on Facebook for that one. Is it some way BLOX is displaying the images that prevents Facebook from seeing them? Are we doing something wrong?
I've read the BLOX documentation page and all it lists are the custom properties. These are URL custom properties but am I supposed to set it for ALL urls? Do I give the property og_image a value? The documentation says nothing about giving it a value. But all of the custom properties I know in BLOX have some sort of value.
Facebook pulling in wrong image when posts are shared
Hi there,
We've had a sporadic problem where, in an article without an added image, Facebook is pulling in random images when users share a story (generally starting with a mugshot of the supervising editor or the author, because those are the largest images on a page). We have the Facebook og:image set to be just a plain Missourian logo, but it seems the sharing function is ignoring that altogether.
Has anyone run into this problem, and if so how did you go about resolving it?
Make sure your og image is the right size. Facebook has increased their desired og image sizes in the past few years, and if it doesn't like your og image (even though that's the image you are specifically telling them to use) they will use something else instead.
They recommend these sizes:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices#images
No documentation on FLEX infinity scroll
Within a few FLEX blocks' template customizations there is an option for "Infinity scroll." I looked on here and help.bloxcms.com and there's nothing about the infinity scroll. I've tested it but can't get it to do anything. Is that feature live yet?
Big gaps between Group - Access levels
We needed an employee to have access to the subscriptions area of the site and it makes sense to also give that person access to users/accounts. Access to subscriptions is fine but to get access to users/accounts you have to be a manager. And as a manager you can do just about anything you want on the site. That's a HUGE gap in privilege.
Is there some way to allow someone to change user info without giving them the ability to move template blocks around, run jobs and change workflows?
I think a good way to approach this would be to create a "Circulation" or "User management" access level. This would give them the ability to start online subscriptions, access transactions and change user account info.
Feature Request: Add Centerpiece flag to Collection assets
I’m curious why Collection assets are missing, among others, the Centerpiece flag?
Very often a Collection (Wildart Package, Enterprise package, etc.) will be the Centerpiece of our printed paper and thus we’d like it to be the Centerpiece of our website as well.
How difficult would it be to add this flag to Collections?
Customer support service by UserEcho
