What's the most important factor for determining which assets are placed on a page?
Budgeting.
Automated Production requires either Active or Passive use of Budgeting.
Active Budgeting
Active Budgeting is accomplished in the browser interface by using any of the following options:
- Publications accordion of Editorial > Assets
- Add Page to Assets throughout Page Page Tracker
- The Assignment Tool
Active Budgeting can direct an asset to the Edition, the Section, or a specific Page based upon how the user specifies those options.Â
Passive Budgeting
Passive Budgeting is used to specify the Edition only. It is accomplished by including the edition information in the Slug according to the slugging naming convention. That naming convention is specified in Page Tracker's Application Settings and can be overridden on a publication by publication basis using options in Edit Publication in the Page Creation Settings dialog.
Which is Better: Active or Passive Budgeting?
Active Budgeting where the Section and Page is specified is definitely the goal if you want to control which page a BLOX Total CMS asset is going to placed on.
Passive Budgeting was developed only as a fall-back resource. Because a user can mistype something and break Passive Budgeting, it should be considered a weak last resort. It works, but it depends upon the user doing the correct steps. In addition, if an asset gets held to a different day, be sure to edit the slug. Since Passive Budgeting doesn't appear on the actual budget in Page Tracker, you don't have a fast filter to find those things that were budgeted but not placed.Â
What if Active Budgeting to the Page doesn't fill the page?
Page Content Type Mapping.
Page Types are typically assigned by the Ad Layout staff. Those might be something like 'Opinion', 'Obituaries', 'World News', 'Baseball', 'Comics', 'School News', etc. If Active Budgeting to the Page didn't provide enough assets to fill the page, the second line is to locate assets that are budgeted (Active or Passive) to the page's Edition and are being displayed on web-site sections that are mapped to the Page Content Types.
It is expected that this mapping will, in some cases, not provide enough assets to fill some pages and provide too many assets for other pages. Like Passive Budgeting, it is a crutch for proper Active Budgeting.
And what if Page Content Mapping can't fill the page?
When that second line can't fill the page, Active Budgeting to the Section will be used to locate any unplaced assets.Â
When that fails then the Active Budgeting to the Edition and finally Passive Budgeting will be used.Â
In both cases, any assets with Active Budgeting to a page will be ignored unless that page has reached its final/completed stage.Â
