Ideas
Timing element for block
Has there been any thought given to having a time element for how long a block appears on a site?
For example, we have a block on our homepage (as I'm sure everyone does) that displays any stories with the "Breaking" flag attached. However, if we have such a story that we want to draw attention to as breaking news, we only want it to be considered "breaking" for a short period of time, maybe a few hours.
What would be really helpful is if we could have the "breaking news" block appear for a designated period of time instead of having to go back into BLOX or TCMS and removing the "Breaking" flag from the article asset to get the block to go away. It would just take away a little bit of the manual intervention that is currently necessary.
Thanks.
Dave
Answer
I suggested dealing with this from the other side, auto-expiring the breaking flag after a set period of time, four years ago.
https://community.townnews.com/communities/1/topics/30-auto-expire-an-asset-flag
I like that idea even better!
You also make a good point in your original ticket that having a timing element on the block would still exclude that story from appearing elsewhere on the page (or site) if said flag is still attached. An auto-expire on a flag would be ideal.
There are several different ways to do this:
- Tell your breaking news block to only show items that are less than 2 hours old. So whenever a article is two hours away from its start time, it will be removed from the block automatically. This is great when you are OK with all breaking news being promoted for the same period of time. If there is an edge case that needs to be online for longer, use can use a pinned asset with a schedule.
- Add an archived date to your breaking news article, and then create a rule on your breaking news block that doesn't show items that are archived. This is helpful when you want to have custom "expiration" times on a per-article basis.
- Use a pinned asset that has a scheduled time to unpin. You can use this in combination with the above two solutions.
- Create a new schedule which shows the breaking news block for a period of time. This is likely overly complicated since you'd have to go into the block editor to create a schedule. This is more likely to be useful for recurring events (like afternoon updates or Friday night prep sports) rather than breaking news. But, if there was a big specialized layout with multiple blocks for the breaking news initiative, a scheduled layout may be helpful.
With all that being said, we are looking into new ways to indicate "alerts" and things along those lines. For example, if you find a breaking news article from 2013, it will still say BREAKING next to it, or it may even say that in the headline. Those are things that are still in discussion.
Thanks for the response, Christine.
However, I don't see an option to tell a block to display an item based on time (display an item less than two hours old). The only option I see is based on start date with no option for time.
The same goes for archived time query rule which has an option to set a date but not a time within that date. I could set an archive date/time on an article asset (e.g. two hours from publication/start time), but the query rule would only look at the date and therefore would not display the asset.
It seems that the scheduled pinned asset would be the best option for us, though would require going into the block editor every time we want to use the block.
Dave
These options work, but don't overcome the problems mentioned in my old thread which is why I still think it is a better solution:
https://community.townnews.com/communities/1/topics/30-auto-expire-an-asset-flag
What we really want is a way to not simply stop displaying a breaking article, but have that particular article no longer be flagged as breaking after a period of time.
Customer support service by UserEcho
There are several different ways to do this:
- Tell your breaking news block to only show items that are less than 2 hours old. So whenever a article is two hours away from its start time, it will be removed from the block automatically. This is great when you are OK with all breaking news being promoted for the same period of time. If there is an edge case that needs to be online for longer, use can use a pinned asset with a schedule.
- Add an archived date to your breaking news article, and then create a rule on your breaking news block that doesn't show items that are archived. This is helpful when you want to have custom "expiration" times on a per-article basis.
- Use a pinned asset that has a scheduled time to unpin. You can use this in combination with the above two solutions.
- Create a new schedule which shows the breaking news block for a period of time. This is likely overly complicated since you'd have to go into the block editor to create a schedule. This is more likely to be useful for recurring events (like afternoon updates or Friday night prep sports) rather than breaking news. But, if there was a big specialized layout with multiple blocks for the breaking news initiative, a scheduled layout may be helpful.
With all that being said, we are looking into new ways to indicate "alerts" and things along those lines. For example, if you find a breaking news article from 2013, it will still say BREAKING next to it, or it may even say that in the headline. Those are things that are still in discussion.