CMS Vendors
BLOX
BLOX Digital
BLOX CMS (formerly 'TownNews') is a feature-rich publishing and revenue platform from a rather old-fashioned vendor that trades a somewhat archaic platform for excellent customer support.
- The platform supports editorial publishing, website and mobile app management and audience development/revgen from a single, integrated environment
- The wide feature set is also somewhat shallow in depth and so the platform is best suited to small to mid-sized independent news organisations with limited (or no) internal tech support
- Some named customers include The St. Louis Observer Post-Dispatch, Richmond Times Dispatch, Toronto Star and College Station Eagle (all North America).
Likely fit
BLOX CMS is a good fit for mid-sized or small independent publishers in North America that don't have in-house tech strategists and developers but want an accessible and broadly featured platform at a lower price point — and are willing to accept some odd quirks and a dated interface as part of the bargain. News organisations with a more composable architecture that want to swap components in and out, or who want to support multiple titles from a single code-base, would likely not fit this platform. BLOX Digital will point you to larger publications like the St. Louis Observer and Toronto Star but they seem the exception rather than the rule.
At a glance
Primary customer fit
Small independent news organisation
Secondary fit
Mid-sized independent news organisation
Most active geographies
North America
Official support hours
Email: 7.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m. CT – 24/7 for 'critical issues'
Phone: 7.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m. CT – 24/7 for 'critical issues'
Officially supported languages for user interface
EN
Third-party language support available?
No
Licence model
Vendor would not share details; likely based on user numbers, repository size and traffic volumes — comparatively mid-priced in the market
Scope summary
BLOX CMS is a broad-featured platform designed for an organisation that wants content production, site management and revenue management tightly bundled into a single offering
Tech base
PHP/SOLR
Cloud model
Managed service (PaaS)
Headquarters
East Moline, IL, US + virtual
Head count
130
What customers report
- Unusually wide range of editorial and front-end features for what customers identify as a comparatively attractive price point
- Easy for entry-level reporters to learn, with useful training videos
- Customers praise the Audiences revenue module for handling the basics very well
- Platform as shipped typically does not require your own IT staff, including for audience/revenue development
- Vendor has a kind of homespun internal culture that emphasises close relationships with customers
- Reporting subsystem has regressed in recent additions, especially around revenue metrics
- Monolithic architecture is not very composable: You purchase the whole shebang and cannot do things like run in headless mode or readily swap in your own digital asset management (DAM) platform
- User experience feels dated and a bit clunky; modernisation could require more resources than the vendor can muster
- Vendor sometimes proves too casual when implementing new or replacement features, sometimes leading to unexpected feature loss or bugginess
- Some customers report delays in addressing request backlogs, even as the vendor rolls out new features
- You are bound to BLOX Digital as your implementation partner, which may reduce your choices and means you must depend on their availability
Background
- The history of BLOX Digital goes back to 1989 when a veteran AP journalist and some partners built the first (print) publishing platform. Since then, the vendor has built out both print and digital CMS tools. The vendor was acquired by Lee Enterprises (a diversified North American publishing chain) in the late 1990s, and today all 80 Lee Enterprises publications use BLOX CMS. Overall, BLOX Digital supports 2,100 licensees, of which 400 use its older print platform as well. The customer base seems oriented towards article-heavy dailies and weeklies, with a special niche in college daily papers and local business weeklies.
- The real value of this offering is that it tightly couples content production, website management and revenue generation in a single solution. It's designed for high-volume article publishing and licensees, such as university student newspapers, praise the ease of onboarding even an itinerant newsroom staff. Beyond BLOX CMS, you can license (the somewhat older) TotalCMS ('tCMS') for print management.
- The content management system (CMS) interface is very busy and somewhat outdated in appearance. On the plus side, the editorial interface is feature rich and allows for very detailed page and section management. You will also find useful collaboration features but overall the system is designed as an article publishing machine, allowing rapid throughput from creation to approval and publishing. It's supplemented by useful video asset management services, but the platform's simpler photo asset management subsystem feels clunky and underdeveloped to some licensees.
- In general, the overall UX feels like the vendor tried to accommodate numerous client requests without great prioritisation and customers have noted that the feature set, while broad, can prove shallow as well. For example, you can easily set up all kinds of different automated transactional emails but you must build them in plain HTML. In theory, nearly every publishing use case or feature can get accommodated in BLOX CMS; in practice, most smaller licensees tend to have BLOX Digital set up the environment and then just let it run on its own — turning to the vendor again for any subsequent tweaks.
- An Audiences module comes bundled with the platform. It seems reasonably mature and offers a wide range of features from registration walls to paywalls and a PayPal-based payment module by default.
- All this makes BLOX CMS a good fit for mid-sized or small independent publishers that don't have in-house tech strategists and developers but want an accessible and broadly featured platform at a lower price point. Ideally you'd be based in the US or English-speaking Canada, as the UX today is English-only. BLOX Digital will point you to larger publications like the St. Louis Observer and Toronto Star but they seem more the exception than the rule.
- BLOX Digital hosts the CMS for you at their New Jersey, US, data centre and bundles a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Each title becomes its own separate tenant, though you can share content among properties via syndication. Although editors can access all separate titles from a single login, BLOX CMS may prove less than ideal for multi-title sites that want to share features or customisations and not just content.
- Developers employ a template engine similar to the popular open-source 'PHP Smarty' templating module. Some mid-sized organisations engage their own developers for templates and other configurations but most licensees — especially smaller ones — seem to rely on BLOX Digital's own services teams for this. This has hindered some licensees from readily deploying microsites that break their standard template mould. In any event, the vendor does not have any channel partners, so you must turn to them for any advanced work.
- Note there is no 'plug-in' model for third-party custom applications (though you can add external widgets to your templates), as you would see with Drupal or WordPress. BLOX Digital does resell some tightly integrated platforms, like Constant Contact, for more advanced email newsletters and marketing.
- In sum, this is a rich platform from a vendor that tries very hard to wrap itself around its customers to help them succeed. However, you will find technical debt here, especially on the architecture side, and the firm's recent financial filings that indicate declining revenues (driven by reduced print business) call into question whether enough resources will become available for a major modernisation push.
Package scope (as reported by vendor)
| Core platform - i.e., bundled in product (yes/no/beta) | Add-On (yes/custom/3rd party) | |
|---|---|---|
|
Content lifecycle: author / classify / edit / approve / publish / re-purpose / archive / dispose
|
Yes
|
|
|
Basic digital / voice / media asset management
|
Yes
|
|
|
Support print publishing
|
No
|
Yes
|
|
Simple social media re-publishing
|
Yes
|
|
|
Optional modules: forms / polls / social widgets / etc
|
Yes
|
|
|
Connector library (OOTB connectors, APIs, etc.)
|
Yes
|
|
|
Bundled CDN (with DDOS protection)
|
Yes
|
|
|
User registration
|
Yes
|
|
|
Subscription management and fulfillment - digital
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Subscription or membership
|
No
|
|
|
Personalisation
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Ad management - digital
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Ad management - print
|
No
|
|
|
Content management
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Research
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Content management
|
Yes
|
|
|
Video management / OVP
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Audio management / podcasting
|
Yes
|
|
|
Data journalism and visualisation
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Classifieds
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Commenting / community features/
|
Yes
|
|
|
Newsletter production and management
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Notifications and alerts
|
Yes
|
|
|
A/B testing
|
No
|
|
|
SEO
|
Yes
|
|
|
Multi-title management with variable inheritance
|
No
|
|
|
Complex layout and subsite / subsection cloning
|
Yes
|
|
|
AR- / VR- enhanced services
|
No
|
|
|
Audience segmentation
|
Yes
|
|
|
Online user / partner forums
|
Yes
|
|
|
Regular user group meetings
|
No
|
|
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