I'm new to the BLOX system but I was wondering if there is any way to clone our site into a test environment for me to look at while playing with design, templates, etc.

Thanks everyone! I look forward to learning more about this robust system.

We've been getting people who can't share article pages using the AddThis tool. The error says:

This content is no longer available
The content you requested cannot be displayed right now. It may be temporarily unavailable, the link you clicked on may have expired, or you may not have permission to view this page.

This has been happening for at least the past few days, but it could have been even earlier than that. Has anyone else seen this error?

I assume this would be a feature request because I don’t think the ability exists already.

We would like to have a setting that allows us to specify analytics campaign tracking parameters to the tail of URLs posted using the Social Broadcast feature. At a minimum customizable per “Account,” but ideally it would be customizable per “Channel.”

For those unfamiliar with what I’m talking about, it would change this URL:

http://www.galvnews.com/news/article_dcf8a6a2-af4b-5b7f-8ad9-05db087cebd6.html

To this:

http://www.galvnews.com/news/article_dcf8a6a2-af4b-5b7f-8ad9-05db087cebd6.html?utm_source=blox&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=socialmedia

Which can then be used to better track goals, sources and promotions in Google Analytics.

Let me know what y’all think.

I just noticed this today, but it seems like child article assets attached to another asset behave the way we used to expect sibling assets to behave in the old Zen templates.

Complicated words. Let me explain.

For example, if you add an article as a child to another, it appears in the parent article's sidebar as a content box. However, if you then visit the "child" asset, it shows a similar content box that contains the "parent."

This reciprocal linking is the same way things work when articles are related as siblings; however, the sibling display is a simple list of headline links with no rich media.

Back under Zen templates, the reciprocal links would only happen when things were related as siblings. A child/parent relationship added the child as a sidebar to the parent.

It seems like the sibling and child relationships do exactly the same things under Flex, just with different formatting. Is this by design?

Shouldn't the parent/child relationship be more of a "this asset is subordinate to this other asset" relationship, rather than "these assets are on an equal footing"?

When we switched to the new Flex site, our Facebook "like" counter disappeared (Twitter, too). We used to be able to see the number of people who "liked" the story, but now there is just a button to "Share on Facebook." Anyone know how to make those numbers visible again?

I tried Settings > Site > Custom properties and changing "facebook_count_style" to "button-count" but don't see any changes on our site.

Thank you!

We recently had a complaint from a user that our web forms for wedding announcements discriminated against the LGBT community as they requested Information for the bride and groom. Has anyone else made changes to their forms for this reason? How did you handle it? Do you have links to updated forms we can review?

My thought is to have a dropdown box and allow the person filling out the form to choose title. (Bride, Groom, 1st Participant) I would like the selection to update the labels for related field (Bride's parents would become 1st participants parent, etc)...

What's your idea?

Webinar recording: Introducing
TownNews.com Content Exchange

At our January webinar, Tim Turner (program manager), gave an overview of the all-new TownNews.com Content Exchange program.

The program allows web publishers to share articles, images and videos with our vast network of media sites to earn additional ad revenue and attract new users.

Highlights include:

• Generating revenue from tag-along ads through the program's generous revenue
  sharing plan.
• Improving visitor satisfaction by offering in-house coverage alongside high-quality journalism from around the country.
• Reaching a wider audience by putting your content and branding in front of more people, on more sites.
• Integrating with the TownNews.com iQ program to target users based on interests, leading to higher revenue gains.

Best of all, the TownNews.com Content Exchange is completely FREE and turnkey for BLOX CMS customers.

For more information, watch the recorded webinar today!

Is it possible to auto generate screen names with the provided Facebook and Google authentication systems? I've enabled the authentication but when signing in the first time it will ask you to enter a Screen Name with the authenticated email automatically filled in. Once completing the CAPTCHA the system feeds back and says "this email address is already used, would you like to login?" This happened with both Facebook and Google signup and sign in pages.

It would be great if the screen name is autogenerated using data from "first name" during authentication. So the user is just logged in without the need to enter more info.

I can take some screen grabs if this doesn't make sense.

Thanks everyone. I just started wrapping my head around the BLOX system last week and It's awesome. I look forward to learning more and hopefully upgrading to FLEX soon.

Is there a way to add functionality for a PDF edition download link outside of the eEdition app? Would like to include a button below the thumbnail.

It would reduce the number of clicks by 4 or more and decrease load time as well especially on low end devices.

We have several Sections as well as numerous cities we cover that are two words. Right now in the footer of our site only the first of the two words is capitalized while the second is not.

See “High school” and “League city” below.

To me the section is only slightly annoying while the city name is a bigger problem. To the average reader it is going to appear that we made a mistake and typed the name of the city incorrectly.

My feature request would be for the Sections and Geolocations in the footer to use title caps. e.g. High School and League City.

Let me know what y’al think, thanks.

Is there an ad region map out there on the positions within the e-edition? (something visual).

Is there a way to crop image previews in the mosaic block? I've tried adding a preview image and a static preview but only cropping the actual image changes what the way the preview displays in the mosaic block.

As I’m sure you all saw in the update last month, Town News will be disabling the use of PGP encrypted email to capture credit card numbers sometime soon.

We had been using this feature very successfully to capture credit card numbers for entry into Circulation Pro for recurring (Easy Pay) subscriptions.

How are the rest of y’all handling recurring subscriptions?

For those who were using PGP email through Town News forms what is your plan for a replacement?

There were several suggestions in the notice from Town News, but redirecting users to a third-party site to enter their payment information is exactly the type of thing we train consumers to watch out for to avoid being scammed.

Thanks for any and all suggestions and discussion!

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I’m wondering if there is a way to edit the behavior / display of the Section and GeoLocation tags that are displayed in an article footer:

I’m actually hoping to do two different things here.

1. Change the name displayed for a section.

We have several nested sections like “/news/free/“ and the text displayed in the footer for an article there just says “Posted in Free.” It would be great if we could customize it to say something like: “Posted in News” or “Posted in Free News” as that will be much more descriptive than the text pulled right now.

2. Change the URL that a GeoLocation links to.

By default when clicking the Location Tag link the site runs a search for assets that have that GeoLocation tagged: http://www.galvnews.com/topic/?g=seabrook&t=&l=25&d=&d1=&d2=&f=html&s=&sd=desc&s=start_time

I’d like to be able to edit the URL associated with a Geolocation to instead point to a URL that I’ve setup with blocks that run this same filter, e.g. http://www.galvnews.com/communities/galveston

This presents a much cleaner display of headlines without the large search box at the top.

Please let me know what y’all think or if this is already possible and I just missed it.

Thanks!

We have our first ad that's set for a limited number of impressions instead of a date range. The date of the event the ad is for(which I set as the absolute end date) is approaching quickly but the impression limit hasn't been met. But it isn't showing online anymore today. I did some research on help.bloxcms.com and I see that it's spreading it over the course of the ad's start and stop date. I don't want it to do that.

I see this on the help site: "If the scheduled run dates for the ad are MORE THAN 2 years, the Total impression limit will be a simple, hard limit from the start date of the ad."

So does that mean if I set it to end on Jan 1, 2038 it will just run through the impressions as quickly as it can display the ad rather than spreading the impressions? Because that's what I want.