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.
Batch exporting photos?
Hello, is there a way to select and batch export photos other than a bmp file. When I try to open this file in Photoshop, I get "Could not complete your request because it is not the right type of document." It also won't open in Microsoft Paint. It is incredibly difficult to get photos out of Blox. Is there another option that doesn't include opening each asset, viewing high-res and right-clicking to save?
Thanks
Photo Quality Down?
I've worked with BLOX/CMS for four years and noticed about half a year ago that the quality of photos, especially those that are more vertical and when viewing on a phone, were a lot less crisp. Specifically I've noticed a lot of jagged edges.
Has anyone else noticed this?
Is there any setting or adjust I can make to improve this?
Hello. We've actually identified the issue, which at its core is how the chrome/edge rendering engine handles re-scaling. Firefox seems to handle the resizing a bit better, but we've seen it with both Chrome and Edge. We've come up with a potential work-around that we are currently working to implement that may help resolve the issue. This should be released quite early in the new year.
Joe Hansen
Blox Digital
Director of Solutions Support
Television commercials in your video section
For those of you who run your advertisers's commercials in your video section, what do you charge for it?
How to display newsletter preheader and "view in browser"
Is there a way to have both a preheader and "view in browser" link on the same newsletter? It looks like the page customization allows you to do one or the other, but not both.
meta description
How do I change the meta description in blox so that something other than the weather comes up when we show up in google searches. This was asked once before but the article that was supposed to show us how to do that is no longer there. Thank you!
How to add a required asset to an editorial article?
Editorial articles used to not be able to be saved unless I had written an SEO headline. Somehow, it was a required asset, along with a title and I would receive a pop-up error message unless there was an SEO headline. Very recently, this reverted and I am able to save articles without writing an SEO headline. How do I change it back, adding another requirement that needs to be included before saving?
There has always only been one required field, the headline. The only requirement regarding SEO Headline was that the headline be less than 63 characters in length. If it was over that, you would have gotten an error, but it's never been a required field.
There is no way to set required fields with Blox CMS.
Joe Hansen
Director of Solutions Support
Blox Digital
feed API content to a content block?
I am working on a data table component first for our Sports section, then hopefully as a reusable Block for the site. With permission I'm going to scrape some data from a regional sports stats/schedules website to feed into this table. I imagine the table needs to be updated once a day or as changes are published. I want to create a public JSON API with the scraped data. Has anyone used BLOX webservices or macros or anything within the BLOX CMS to do something like this?
JPG Images Uploaded To CMS Appear To Be Dropping Metadata/IPTC Information Normally Displayed In Album
Example 1 (left) album does not display metadata -->
Example 2 (right) album does show metadata --> https://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/sports/prep/photos-grayson-at-archer-girls-basketball/collection_f23f7d96-bfdc-11ee-9eef-d3b52c03f22e.html#2
Both JPG images were uploaded by the same sports editor from the same computer and it was confirmed that the JPG with the missing metadata had the content embedded and viewable using Mac Preview/Get Info prior to upload. The JPG images that are mising the metadata was shot using Nikon Z9 RAW, processed using Photo Mechanic where captions were added, and then save out of PM as JPG.
Any suggestions on upload settings or conditions that might imact how metadata is handled during upload OR is there any possibility the the newer Z9 format could be causing info. One note, the metadata from the Z9 does contant GPS coordinates.
Dynamic article collections placed inline in articles
We are trying to insert a dynamic collection of articles into an article asset, but no matter which presentation mode we select (series, default, asset), the individual items of the collection do not show up. Do article collections not appear in inline articles?
https://www.wdrb.com/community/as-seen-on-wdrb-news-click-here-for-website-links-mentioned-on-air/article_26dd9a22-bb9d-11ee-adcd-cf95bae2e272.html
This is how the feature was developed. Because dynamic collections are by their nature dynamic instead of a set of assets, the engine would have to drill in and fetch all the related assets for the collection then parse through them. This would lead to some serious memory usage.
It's possible to create custom behavior for this if you reach out to our CS team, but there will need to be great care given to the number of assets to display in the collections. We'd also have to build each presentation behavior to work within an article, so it would be a fairly extensive custom development task.
By default the behavior of an inline dynamic collection is to just display the summary for the collection, which would be the headline/description (as long as those are enabled on the collection) and link to the collection page.
Joe Hansen
Director of Solutions Support
Blox Digital
Items that are not placed in a workflow should not automatically publish to the web
When someone forgets to designate a workflow stage for a budget/story, it automatically publishes to the web. This is a very bad idea. Can it be changed??
I'm not sure if you still need an answer to this question, but if you are in Editorial/Assets, click on the setting panel on the right side. Under Asset Settings -> general, the very first option is "Disable publishing on new assets". This sets all new assets into "Do not publish". You can then have your workflows uncheck the DNP field when the asset reaches that stage in its workflow.
You can also have imported content marked as DNP through the importers in Syndication.
Joe Hansen
Director of Solutions Support
Blox Digital
You can use properties like &s=start_time&sd=desc to sort by start time in descending order.
This help doc provides all the search options that are available.
Joe Hansen
Director of Solutions Support
Blox Digital
Video Indexing Issues
Not sure if anyone noticed, but Google made a change in December that affected how and if videos were indexed. The change created a massive decrease in the number of videos indexed from our sites. Are we alone in this, or are you seeing the same thing?
Check this interaction out from Google support: https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/248660820?hl=en
I'm baffled.
JPF
Manual fix - poll question
I made an error in trying to change a function on a live poll. It reset the results back to 0. But I have the results at the time I made that error. Is it possible to manually restore the correct number with each choice?
Andy,
Unfortunately there isn't a way to edit the poll results.
Joe Hansen
Director of Solutions Support
Blox Digital
Adding elements to multiple sites
What is the best (fastest) way to add a story element to multiple sites? Or transfer an element from one site to a sister site? Right now I have to create the element for one site, export it to my hard drive as a bpm file, then import it to the other sites. It's a clunky and time consuming process for those of us who manage sites for multiple publications. Is there any way to do this more efficiently?
Customer support service by UserEcho
