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Though TownNews 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.
Whole website search options
Any ideas on a search bar that includes multiple types of results like articles, classifieds, calendar, and marketplace. For us, we have a search on our homepage but it only includes the classifieds and searching, for say, a town name and receiving all of the assets that go along with that would make it much simpler for our viewers. Has anyone found a work-around for this?
Is there a way to designate assets not to be included in search results?
It seems silly to have all assets be displayed on the search results
list, especially if some are just images (and especially if some of
those images have funny/incomplete titles). Also, we create some assets
specifically for our e-mail newsletter, and those are not to be
displayed anywhere else on our website, except in the newsletter, and
those are showing up in the search results as well.
There must be some way to designate an asset to not be "searchable". Please advise. Thank you!
Any way to disable Amp for just one specific story/url?
When we embed HTML assets in article assets these html assets are only shown as links on Amp pages. Is there a way to disable Amp for specific articles in which the HTML asset is integral to the story?
Webinar | Introducing BLOX Now, a better mobile app for local media
Webinar recording now available.
Taking cues from social media, the BLOX Now mobile app eschews conventional news app design in favor of a single, continuously-scrolling stream of community news and events that keeps users engaged. At our June customer webinar, Susan Bell, BLOX Now senior product manager, and Christine Masters, director of product management, introduced the BLOX Now mobile app.
Topics included:
Increasing user engagement with a hybrid news and information app.
Feature highlights, including: in-stream video playback, push notifications, and convenient fly-out menus.
Monetizing your app with Google DFP integration.
Managing your app, website, and mobile site in one easy workflow.
. . . and much more.
Are you ready to get started . . . now? Webinar recording now available.
Elections 2020 - what would your media organization want?
We are considering building a new "simple" elections platform for the 2020 election cycle and beyond. This would be more streamlined and easy to use than the old Election Stats, and would include AP election data for state and national elections, leaving you to focus on local. You'd still need to update your local race results as often as you want to make them available for your visitors, but the state and national would be automatic.
I'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts on what you would like to see. Is this something your site could use?
What functionality would you want in such a product?
How are you currently handling election results?
Customize Form Appearance
What I thought is a simple change but I can't find anything related- I'm looking to remove the drop shadow on my form headers. I saw other TownNews customers sites without a drop shadow and wanted to do the same. On here is a picture of a current form for us with the drop shadow. Thank you!
Feature request: Support for Facebook Instant Article Metering/Subscription
Facebook is offering an instant article paywall that lets publishers keep 100 percent of subscription revenue.
Details here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tdcq6ocqd1x3hoo/2019-07-25%2013.36%20Subscriptions%20within%20Facebook%20Instant%20Articles.mp4?dl=0
The page that talks about instant article paywall(https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instant-articles/subscriptions/) shows that the integration requires custom FB Pixels events being triggered, on login, and during purchase.
This level of integration doesn’t appear to be something that can be done in GTM, nor in BLOX templates, and seems to require BLOX software support.The page that discusses account linking (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instant-articles/subscriptions/account-linking) mentions the need for “signed pixel events.”
That page shows sample code in PHP to generate the signed data, which requires access to the FB App secret, which would be unique to each BLOX website, just as the FB App is unique to that website.
This whole process requires running code server side to keep secrets. The “account linking” event requires an account_id to link the FB user to the BLOX user (for subscriber access details.) The only really reliable/secure account_id is the user’s UUID, which isn’t exposed in a cookie, so the front-end doesn’t have access to it .
Scheduling blocks
I think a nice feature would be a custom option within a block to schedule it for certain times.
We currently have a few blocks that I only have show up on a single day of the week so I manually disable it when we don't need it. Having something with the block options itself where I could schedule it to enable and disable itself would be great.
How do you handle when an asset that has an update to make sure the latest version gets on your page
Hi Alex!
An asset that has published changes will update automatically within moments - you just have to contend with any related caching time (including browser cache).
On front and index pages, where the asset must get through additional layers of caching, it may take longer.
However, please see this help article on how to speed up page updates for breaking and important news:
Watch it now | Digital Design Boot Camp: Crafting articles that engage
Webinar recording now available.
Though videos and podcasts are all the rage, the workaday, unsung article still accounts for more than half of all page views across the TownNews network. How can you make the most of this potential? At our October webinar, Christine Masters, director of product management for TownNews, led a panel discussion on easy design strategies you can use to create high-impact articles that grow and engage your audience.
Topics included:
- Developing your article design “North Star” game plan, with KPIs
- Creating beautiful, magazine-style pages with our built-in Article Designer
- Distributing your content to AMP, Facebook, and other platforms
- Keeping your audience engaged with push notifications
- . . . and much more!
Ready to get started? Webinar recording now available.
Save search result format
In the editorial section of Blox or TCMS, I can add columns, shuffle them around and just generally set things up in a way that's efficient for me. (Sort by start date, for example, or mark which stories have a site tag or which stories are marked "do not publish.") The next time I log in, the page will be set up the same way. That's great.
But when I'm in an asset and want to add child or sibling assets, the search results don't have the same functionality — I can show or hide columns that are or aren't relevant, move columns around to find what I want, but the next time I go to add a child or sibling asset, I have to do to the same thing again. It's time-consuming and, well, annoying. Any chance of being able to save those search result formats on a user basis?
Batch edit utility - change more than 25 at a time
There are several different requests in here:
- A "mass" batch edit. We are working on this currently... it should be available in Q2 of this year. It allows you to create a search and then apply batch edit to that entire search results, even if it affects thousands of assets. There will be an extra confirmation process where you must type in the number of assets so that you are sure that you know how many assets you are affecting. The task on large amounts of assets happens as a background task (so it can take as long as it needs) and then sends you an email when you're done. So, for Nick's needs, this would definitely work).
- The ability to see more assets on a search results page in the BLOX admin. The solution for this will likely come as part of our new backend UI, which will likely end up being some kind of infinity scroll.
Lastly, there is the request for a batch edit function to change headlines and captions. To be honest, we are worried about allowing content to be changed in a batch editing process. Firstly, it's considered bad SEO to have similar titles on multiple pages in your site. Secondly, having all headlines (such as on a vertical gallery) is kind of annoying and repetitive to the reader.
On the other hand, I of course realize that if you don't add a title, we'll use the filename instead. And typing 200 unique, accurate titles is a very time-consuming task to say the least! Also, the only thing worse than a vertical gallery with repeated identical headlines is a vertical gallery with filenames as headlines instead! And, we currently provide no mechanism for them to be hidden as an option.
However, maybe we can fix some of those underlying problems instead. Basically, we're thinking that batch editing headlines and captions is a symptom of a bigger problem rather than a problem in and of itself.
What about something like this:
- A collection asset has the option of not showing photos and captions, even if they exist.
- In places where we have to show some kind of title (such as search results) maybe we show the parent's title instead?
Or:
- A way for the photo itself to know whether or not it has a unique headline, and if it does, display it. If not, display the parent (unless on a collection page). I would have to think more on how it can know it is a unique title...
Freature Request: Form Success Page/Messages
When a user signs up for any email reach newsletters, they are greeted with a blank page reading only "Thank You" after completing the signup.
There is no link to return the user to the home page, there is no site navigation, or branding, or ads.
When a user signs up for a newsletter, there should be an option to redirect them to a site page, or static page.
This can be accomplished by adding a "Landing Page URL:" or "Thank You Page URL:" field to the Edit List dialog for individual campaigns.
Have a close option on mobile admin site
I often make some quick fixes to stories in the morning from the admin interface on my phone. But since there is no close option, it keeps me locked in the asset. Am I missing something? Is there a way to truly "close" the asset?
Customer support service by UserEcho
