I've had a feature request open about this since last May (Ticket 666975) but wanted to get some public visibility on it as well. The addition of BLOX Notifier actually makes the situation worse and I have some good example images to share.

There are now two different ways to automatically send emails upon specific conditions in BLOX and both of them lack the customization ability needed to maintain a newspaper's brand and achieve specific goals.

First are examples of what our current breaking news emails look like, but they have to be sent manually through Email Reach's "Single Run." They maintain the style of all our other email newsletters and meet branding goals at the expense of being a manual process that gets forgotten at times.

Automatic Alerts for BLOX Email Reach

https://help.bloxcms.com/knowledge-base/releases/software_releases/article_618ad806-8df5-50cc-9e51-45980a69c21d.html

This option has been around for a couple years and allows filtering that most papers would need, however there is no ability to customize how these emails look. You are stuck with the examples below.

BLOX Notifier

https://help.bloxcms.com/knowledge-base/releases/software_releases/article_3cbfbd8a-a89f-5ac0-ad3c-1a37108b5ac8.html

I was hopeful the newly released BLOX Notifier would bring some improvements but unfortunately it is even worse. Emails produced by it are completely void of branding and most other useful information.

It would be great to have a username associated with video clips that are created in Blackbird and Field59. As an admin, it would be extremely helpful to be able to quickly identify the person that created a specific video clip.

This feature would come in handy if a video clip were erroneously published or efforts were duplicated by 2 users. Currently we have no way of identifying the clip's creator. 

Does anyone else have subscribers that are experiencing issues with the eEdition where they go into it and they just get a white screen? We've got about 15 now. Tried different browsers tried resetting passwords. Development is looking at it but I didn't know if it was just us. 

Is there a way to have a story that has been syndicated to stop being automatically revised once it is brought into our system? I.e. is there a way to "disconnect" from a syndication channel?

Other methods we used in the past are not reliable since the new update. This is important since sometimes a story in another market will focus on one municipality, while we want to move up content about our local market.

But in the new system, simply creating a copy of the original asset can result in assets appearing as duplicates on the site. And we cannot reliably remove the original asset without breaking an original link that's already been shared OR reliably "hide" it from our homepage because if it gets revised again then our edits will be undone.

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I would like to create a suggestion mechanism for the Content Exchange. If we produce something that has broad appeal, that we can highlight it for other news organizations. For example, we are starting a op-ed-column on national issues and it can be helpful to organizations outside my area (CT). With so much of the Content Exchange being sports and celebrity stuff, this can be something that would be lost in that group. 

I would love to have Instagram added to the Broadcast channel with the ability to scrape a child asset photo from an article asset. We've found that there's never enough time to take the extra steps to post into Instagram independently.   

This has come up before, but was a good suggestion from one of our subscribers via twitter.
Is there a way that would allow subscribers to share articles that would not be subject to paywall? This could turn our subscribers into real ambassadors for our sites. NYT and WaPo allow subscribers 10 shares a month and remind them of that benefit each time they share. 

https://twitter.com/FlappyMcB/status/1516470200157224964

We'd like to see the ability to optionally set a time for each block that would prevent the asset timestamp from being shown to the public. In other words, we may wish to suppress the timestamp on home page articles once they are older than 4 hours. It may look better to have *no* timestamp than a timestamp that clearly states to the public that we've not made any material changes to the article in x number of hours.

Ideally, this would be an option that could be set individually on each display block.

Many publications now have a splash page from Instagram and I feel like this could be an easy addition in BLOX. We have interns run our Instagram and sometimes a post may be a story from a day or two before. If a reader uses the link in the Istagram bio, it takes them to our front page, however, the story may now be buried and readers may not take the time to find the related article.

What I would like is a splash page. When a reader uses the link it would take them to a BLOX page that just has the images from Instagram. These images would then act as a link to the corresponding story. This would be useful for all aging content and help to get more eyes on stories and less frustration.

I talked to TownNews and there's nothing available like this yet. Have any users built something like this or have any suggestions?

Hello everyone,

We are wanting to set up an online store, selling merchandise such as t-shirts etc for a host of promotional items we run. Currently, we have a https://PRINTful.com account set up this, but it looks like there is no easy way to integrate the API with Blox CMS? 

Does anyone have any other platform they may be using or work around without building out another site with a Shopify account or WordPress? Screen Shot 2019-01-16 at 3.22.29 PM.png

Hey everyone! 

We cut ties with Merlin at the end of last year and have been manually sending PDFs to NewsBank to archive every night, but when we stopped using Merlin apparently the XML feed of stories stopped sending. 

I was curious if any other TownNews entities have anything automated through TownNews to send this feed to NewsBank? Or any best practices to get it from CMS to NewsBank? 

Thanks!