Hi Jason!

NOTE TO ALL: If you like these ideas, please vote for this product and give us feedback to let us know it is important to you! =)

I can't make any promises, but this is something I have on my map to create a possible product plan in the next few weeks/months. (After we do a preliminary product plan, we take the product to management for approval.)

But, any info you (or anyone reading this) can provide would help me a ton! Here is what I'm thinking so far:

Obviously these are just ideas I am brainstorming which could be included in a product plan - they are not promises or guarantees of development or delivery. This is one of the great uses for this community forum - we can help spec out products with the help of the community! =)

- There would be a new "change" asset in the Calendar application or possibly a new application.

- The change asset would support modes for delay, cancellation, change (what else can you think of?).

- The asset would allow for a time length which would signal the amount of time that the change would be in effect.

- This asset could then be related to events, businesses, game assets (in Sports Stats application) as a child, signaling a major change to that asset. So, on a business, it would indicate the business is closed, or changed during the specified time. (Maybe closed for snow, maybe closed due to construction, maybe opening is delayed due to hot weather, etc. A change could be something like, this business is out of iPhone 8s, but expects another shipment on Monday.) On an event, it would indicate the event was cancelled or changed during the specified time (the concert was canceled. A change on an event could mean than one performer (out of several) has canceled, or perhaps that the lead of a play is changing.)

- Change assets could also be assigned as children to articles. This would allow the articles to show as links on the change (giving more reason behind the change), and on the article it could create a list of affected businesses / events. (I.e. "Many businesses closed due to 18th St. construction" with a list of related affected businesses below. Or "Schools delay start by 2 hours due to snow" and then a list of change assets showing the schools.)

- People could submit their own change assets via the user dashboard. If they are a business owner, they could submit a closing or delay of their business. A school administrator could submit a cancellation to their "school" (which is actually business asset). An event owner can submit a cancellation of the event that they previous submitted, or that is attached to a business they manage.

- Email Reach / SMS integration, so users can "subscribe" to or follow certain types of events / places to get notifications via e-mail or SMS text.

- Display for cancellations on mobile devices.

- Allow for cancellations to be submitted via a mobile-optimized page.

- Ability to get a feed of cancellations to be shared with other media (if desired).

- Ability to create a widget of cancellations to be placed on other websites (like community sites, schools, ISPs etc.)

- Ability for cancellations to be send via e-mail to a special coded address. (Maybe a school would have a specialized e-mail address they could mail to, and those emails get attached to their business.)

- Ability to accept a feed from a recognized existing data source, if there is one. (Like a TV station or a district notifications site).

Any other ideas? Is there a source for this type of information already in your market that could provide a feed? Or more than one?

Please share any and all insights you may have! =)

Christine

Hi Mike!

We are working on the merged PDF technology... it will be in the next few releases for e-Edition.

As for the automated process... It sounds like we do something similar already with most of our customers. We ask that they are single files, with specific names to tell us the page and section, and then we want them in different folders for each publication. So, we'd create a folder for "newspaper," one for "savvy_shopper," one for "community_desk" or whatever (just making those names up, obviously). One folder for each publication. You upload them via FTP each night, we take care of the rest.

If putting them into separate folders is a problem for your workflow, there may be a way around that - not sure, but I'd have to ask.

Some awesome things about doing e-Editions with BLOX:

- True single sign on.

- Editions and pages are assets, which means you can create blocks of out them. A few cool ideas here:
-  Easy special sections / inserts, etc. that you can promote throughout the site in widgets.

We're also working on some really cool stuff that will be available soon that has to do with the integration between BLOX assets and BLOX e-editions.

Anyway, when you're ready to look into it more, I would recommend submitting a Customer Support ticket with details about your current set up, and ask them to see if there would be any complications. 

Let me know if you have any more ideas or questions! =)

Christine

Hi Tim!

We are working on this technology and it is now on our near-term roadmap.

You won't change how you upload PDFs, they will still be individual pages. But, we will create an option for users to download a merged PDF file.

Note that it will be a rather large file, however.

In general, extra CSS is almost always better. It is minified, gziped, put on a CDN and locally cached. An http request has to travel hundreds of miles and has potential to get caught up in all the tubes of the internet, etc. So, we feel that less http requests are almost always better.

That being said, there are a few cases where we decided to split out some CSS because it was really big and only used on a few minor places (like Online Features). So, we decided to add an extra http to that page (since it isn't the story page or the front page) in exchange for saving CSS on more important pages.

But usually, especially on front and story pages, you almost always opt to save http requests.

Yep, this is what I was thinking. =) That .section container trick gives you a lot of flexibility.

It is also possible load a specific css file for a section...

For example, in the site.inc.utl file, you could add (or ask our CS to add), something like:

if cms.url == '/sports';
cms.page.add_global_css('_site/sections/sports.css');
end;

(Note that I didn't test this, but it would be something like that.)

One thing to watch though is having too many http requests on a page (so the above code would load the sports.css file AND the site.css file, which introduces another http request). We're trying really hard to reduce the number of CSS and JS files we have in order to reduce http requests and speed up page loads.

Also, thanks for your input Mike!

We LOVE seeing customers talk amungst themselves and help each other. This is great!

Hey David!

Do you think this is similar/different from the 'contest' idea here?

http://community.townnews.com/topic/250637-contest-application/

Maybe they could be part of the same application... or would quizes be in editorial?

Also, can you show me a few examples?

Also, can you show me a few examples?

Also, collections! So you can batch upload child assets directly to a photo gallery. =)