The SNO Report: New Year, New Features

Alright, it’s 2017 now. Everybody take a breath. You made it through last year, you kept it pretty much together, and you and your newspaper staff even managed to run a pretty killer online publication. From us to you: bravo. Seriously. You and your staff have big jobs and we admire the hard work you do generating awesome material and designing super cool sites.

We’ve been hard at work, too. It’s cold in Minnesota, but we’re keeping warm by coming up with new ideas and building new tools to help you make your site even more extra. We think you’ll like our brand new features, and we can’t wait to see what you do with them.

Custom Category Pages

You guys wanted more options for category page displays, and your wish is our command. Now you can customize category pages to your liking, and you can make a custom view for each category. Awesome. And what’s better than that? The new category page design options are widget-based –– any widget can go there. That means you can design each widget any way you want, and you can do it on every category page. And the widgets utilize a drag and drop interface, so changes are super easy to make. So cool. And one more thing: we added a carousel widget for category pages, so you can make them look just as bodacious as your home-page. You’re welcome.

New and Improved Slideshow

We know slideshows are awesome, and we just made SNO slideshows even better. Now, instead of remaining in a static location within your story and showing thumbnails, your slideshow will be interactive. Readers can click on the collection of photos, and a pop-out slideshow window will open automatically so readers can click through at their own pace. This format automatically sizes photos from within, so vertical pictures show up nicely even alongside horizontal ones, without changing the size of the window. And you get your choice of a dark or light background. Neato.

MORE Homepage Widget Areas!

No longer are you bound by prescribed Showcase Carousel or Teaser Bar aesthetics! With three new, full-width widget areas, you can customize your site even more than you already have. The new widget areas are located at the top, middle, and bottom of your page, and you can use as many or as few of them as you like. Use the same, super easy drag-and-drop interface you’re used to, and add any widget you want. Pair the new widget areas with the new carousel widget, and the design possibilities are out of this world.

Story Scroll Bar

Aka: “teasers galore.” The Story Scroll bar is a horizontal bar of thumbnail story suggestions, and you can apply it to the top of your homepage, or the bottom of your story pages, or neither, or both! It’s totally up to you. When you add it to story pages, it’ll appear at the bottom of a story when your reader scrolls up, suggesting more content based on category, tag, or writer. When you add it to the homepage, it acts as a mini-carousel in the header area, and it’ll grab your reader’s eye with story suggestions. Wherever you put it, you’ll have attractive thumbnail photos next to teaser text, and you can apply a light background or a dark one, whichever suits your fancy. You decide what to display, and you can change your mind as often as you want, no sweat.

Cool stuff, right? We thought so, too. To see the new features on your website today, simply click the Updates link in your FLEX dashboard and upgrade to version 6.7.  Need help upgrading, just drop us a line.

Now, the next step is learning to use the new features. Join us for a live SNODrift webinar on Tuesday, January 9th at 10 am, CST. We’ll walk through all the new features. Can’t make it? No prob! We’ll post the webinar on our website, too, so you can watch at your leisure.