Welcome to the BLOX Digital (formerly TownNews) customer community! Connect with other BLOX Digital customers—and with us—to suggest features, share best practices and ask questions.
Though BLOX Digital representatives often participate in discussions, this is not a customer service site. For immediate help, call 800-293-9576 or submit a support request via our online ticketing system.
Trying to set up form to email credit card info
We'd rather use PGP to just email one of our employees the credit card info to process so we don't get hit with a transaction fee from PayPal. But when I click "Enable PGP" it doesn't give me an option for a recipient. Is PGP something that has to be turned on by TN staff? And is there a fee to use PGP?
Since this was a question asked so long ago I am sure that our Customer Services folks had answered this as there was no follow up to the question. Since this was posted though we have stopped accepting Credit card information on PGP encrypted forms as part of our PCI compliance strategy.
TownNews.com at NAB Show 2018, Apr 9 - Apr 12
TownNews.com and Field59 will be at the NAB Show next week with special guest Anchorman Ron Burgundy, ready to talk about all things video!
Will you be there? Let us know! Stop by South Upper Hall Booth SU14614 for your chance to meet our team and the Anchorman himself!
Take a pic and post to social with the #StayClassyNAB hashtag, then head across the aisle for a bite and a beer in the Draft House. It's new this year, and we're lucky enough to be right next to it for 4 whole days!
How about adding a batch upload for images in the marketplace?
Would it be possible to incorporate a batch upload button much like we see in the Editorial section of BLOX?
Best practices for failed subscription renewals. Asking for a friend.
We are just now experiencing our first round of failed annual subscription renewals for our membership program.
Users whose cards have changed or whatever are calling and requesting help to renew their memberships (YAY!), but we are struggling with figuring out best practices within BLOX.
- Is there a place where users can update their payment method ala Amazon or eBay?
- If yes, where?
- If no, how do your reps handle these issues? Setup new subscription?
- Is there a renewal button we are missing within BLOX?
links within photo asset captions
I'm trying to get a clickable hyperlink to show up inside photo captions. It seems straightforward to add hyperlinks to the caption while in the back-end asset editor, but when I view the asset from the front end, the link will not be clickable. I just get the plain text.
I thought it might be a browser issue but it happens in both Chrome and Firefox.
Hi Seth!
I am just reviewing some photo-related questions on the site and I see this was missed.
HTML does work in the photo captions, however BR tags in general are removed if they are outside of "block" level elements.
If you want to keep the BR tags, you can put them inside of a block-level element, such as a div tag, and they should remain. Note that the div is counted as a paragraph as far as ads or paging in BLOX CMS.
Also note that inline elements, such as inline photos, can't be placed inside of a block-level element. So when you save it will be placed outside of the div.
Is it possible for centerpiece photo on hub page to be a gallery instead of an image?
So for example, on our site, we have a centerpiece headline, photo, summary text and related links ... it would be cool if there'd be a way to have the gallery arrows added to the top-right hand corner of the photo then, when a user clicks on the arrow, the a full-screen gallery would appear. I think it would allow for a lot of good interaction directly off a page that gets a ton of traffic. This something others have asked about?
Getting around the paywall by turning off cookies- how do we stop that?
We recently discovered that you can get around the TownNews paywall on our site by simply disabling cookies. I have also tested this on other TownNews sites and found that to work there as well. Is there any way we can set up the paywall so that if cookies are blocked, the user automatically has to sign in if they aren't already? Or some other deterrent that if the user disables the cookies that they aren't reading our site for free?
I would like the "Export CSV" within Marketplace / Banner Ads to show only what is on screen.
Right now, when I am viewing only enabled ads in Marketplace / Banner Ads and I click 'Export CSV', it downloads data from all times.
Is this meant to happen, or is this a glitch?
I am looking to quickly print out current banner ads to give to a supervisor, but this method give me 5 years of data instead. I resort to using screen shots. I just want to report it if this is an issue. Other Wise I would like the Export CSV to provide me only what I have check marked.
Font Awesome Question
Got a heads up on this change earlier: https://help.bloxcms.com/knowledge-base/releases/software_releases/image_418c9b9d-c5c1-5c36-b720-7be8da6ed52b.html, where Font Awesome will be upgraded to Font Awesome 5.
Font Awesome 5 seems to have 3 styles (besides brands), Solid, Light, and
Regular.
Is Bl ox CMS going with a particular style? Or are they going to allow site admins to pick within custom properties or something likethat?
Hi Robert!
I did respond to your email as well, but I will add some information here as well so that others can have it as a reference.
NOTE: We have a temporary "fallback" mode that we can enable on your site if you are worried about your icons. This mode will run Font Awesome 4 CSS and classes temporarily in case you (or we) need to make updates. Then, we turn off the "fallback" mode which will switch you back to Font Awesome 5. Please submit a Customer Support ticket if you think there will be an issue.
Firstly, there is more information in this link:
A few important things to note:
- We are not using ALL icons - only a subset, so we can keep the library as small as possible. If you need us to add an icon (we've had a few requests already), just let us know and we can evaluate it.
- For now we are only including some of the branding library, some solid and some regular. We don't use the "light" icons so those are not included at this time. The link above has links to lists of every icon we offer, and as we add more we will add them to those lists.
- Note that we are doing our own namespace for tnt-[name] as shown in the example in the link. This way it will be easier for us to make changes in the future.
- Styling for the FA5 icons will use the tnt-* prefix as well. Example: tnt-2x, tnt-fw, tnt-layers.
Let me know if anyone has questions or if you need more information!
Access block custom properties in UTL
Anyone know syntax for access a block's custom property in UTL? Context would be an to use as parameter in an if statement. It's one of the (many, many) undocumented parts of the language. Thanks folks!
From within the block? Use this.block.custom.(custom property name), depending on the custom property type.
It's in the docs, but kind of hidden there. There is a dev-specific part of the documentation with it.
Also, there's a little question mark in the top-right corner that has some reference stuff.
Article: How Hearst Newspapers changes its paywall to drive reader loyalty
Good read, this level of flexibility looks great:
https://digiday.com/media/hearst-newspapers-changes-paywall-drive-reader-loyalty/
"At the Albany Times-Union, the first paper to test the flexible paywall, the total number of subscribers has doubled since it started tests in September, and the overall number of new subscriber numbers for Hearst Newspapers has jumped 10 percent."
Quiz asset
Webinar recording now available | Refresh your site for spring with these best practices
Watch the webinar recording now
Things move fast in the digital world—blink and you may just miss something! At our March customer webinar, we review recent features and updates you may have missed, and highlight improvements you can implement on your site today.
We showed you:
- Behind-the-scenes advancements that make your site faster and more secure.
- New design features and set-up options you can use to improve your site’s user experience.
- Ad tech optimizations to help you grow local and programmatic revenue.
- New and easy ways to boost audience engagement and time on site.
- . . . and more!
I'm having trouble setting up an Alexa Flash Briefing.
Support says I need a proxy server. Has anyone else got this working that would point me in the right direction please?
Subscribe with Google question
It looks like Google is offering up some new features with its Google News product, including a way for people to subscribe to newspapers with a Google account and a saved (with Google) credit card. It looks like this would streamline subscription for a lot of users, but I assume Google would also take a cut.
https://blog.google/topics/google-news-initiative/introducing-subscribe-google/
Has TN been involved with this at all? Looks like some large publishers are on board.
We have been consulted about the initiative as part of our Google partnership and as part of our AMP integration, but aren't yet part of the beta.
We do have Single Sign-in available now through oAuth 2.0. Here is a page on how to do this: https://help.bloxcms.com/knowledge-base/applications/settings/users/federated_authentication/article_ec11c076-fab5-11e6-b45b-ef23752afc52.html
So, once authenticated, you can log into the BLOX front-end with no sign-in as long as you're signed in to Google.
(We have Facebook authentication as well, which is popular.)
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