The past year has been a busy one at TownNews—in the last 12 months, we’ve unleashed more than 230 new features and upgrades. At this breaknec…
In 2021, the BLOX CMS team continued to focus on ways to improve user engagement with more designs, better functionality, and easier ways to sign up and interact with your site. In addition, we are always working to improve efficiency for our admin BLOX CMS users so they can do more in less time.
With those goals in mind, here are six of the biggest improvements we made last year that you won't want to miss.
1. Create collections that are easier for you and more engaging for your users
We are adding a huge new feature to our Collections asset: Dynamic Collections. This new collection gives you the ability to populate a collec…
With our new Dynamic Collections, you can now switch to a search-based mode to decide how a collection is populated. This allows you to have a larger—almost never-ending—number of photos or assets in a collection, or a collection that builds over time. You can also pin items you want included and set the preview image.
2. Let users subscribe to collections to return for regular updates
Users can view a particular collection and "follow this" to get updates over time. This encourages users to sign in on your site and reenages them with the collection. Since this feature launched, our stats have shown increased traffic back to collections from subscribed users. We're really excited about those initial results we're seeing.
3. Take advantage of new layouts for collections
As part of the release of Dynamic Collections, we're introducing two new collection designs: Search Grid and Special Report. Search Grid creates a mosaic of images, great for large photo galleries. Special Report presents a layout that mimics a section design. These new layouts increase engagement on your site and create a better experience for end users.
Search Grid and Special Report presentations now available.
4. Make searching for section pages easier
This option allows you to set up your URLs so they can be searched within the main site search. When enabled, if a user searches for "dog," the typical asset and image results will still be returned as search results. But if that particular query matches any of the searchable URLs on your site, it will say "did you mean to search for this section?"
This is great for "marketplace" or "classified" searches where a user is most likely looking for a section. And it's easy to set up: just select "Searchable" in the page properties of your URL map. Remember to include the description and titles for that URL.
5. Encourage user logins with new updates
Another of our goals is to make it as easy as possible for end users to log in and interact with your site. With these updates, we've made the login experience easier and clearer. And the simpler it is to log in, the more people will choose to do so.
Having users register and log in to your site is an important engagement factor and a vital first step to getting users more involved. Registered users also begin the path to a membership or subscription, if offered. And, as global data privacy regulations continue to evolve, the registration process provides a valuable way to receive consent from the user to offer a personalized and more relevant experience.
Thanks to these updates, we've already seen an increase of logged in users across the BLOX Digital network as a whole.
6. Save time with improvements in the BLOX CMS admin
A large focus for this past year was on making things simpler for admins that are using the system. We want to make things more efficient and give you all the tools you need.
We’ve completely revamped our help site to make it easier than ever to find the tips and documentation you need, and we're thrilled to share i…
With that in mind, we've launched several new features including: adding multiple keywords in a batch upload process, easier access to the author field when assigning content, and being able to search and find recently created blocks. There's quite a bit we've done and we'll continue to do behind the scenes.
Bonus: Additional releases worth mentioning
Image optimization: We have enabled image optimization on our Content Delivery Network (CDN) to improve image download sizes without diminishing quality.
eEdition clipping tool: We've added the ability for users to clip and save parts of the eEdition. They can print or download the clipping to their device.
SAML 2.0: If your company is using an identity management system, check out our new support for Single Sign-On with SAML 2.0.
Our goal is to make BLOX CMS work better for you! Which new feature will you try out first? Setting up an unlimited collection of your favorite photos? Increasing the number of logged in users? Let us know which ones you're using and what you think of these new options.
BLOX Content Management System gives news and media organizations more digital publishing tools to create content, attract users, and grow their bottom lines. Why settle for less?
