About Blocky
- Martin Tsekov
We call the body of articles, videos, and galleries created with the Sportal365 CSM–”Blocky”. Blocky is an advanced editor that helps journalists customize and enhance their content.
Blocky is inspired by the Gutenberg editor used in WordPress-powered sites (See integration between Sportal365 and WordPress) to make the process of content creation simpler, more reliable, and intuitive for users.
Blocky is arranged in ‘blocks', each with a set of editing, formatting, and widget options. The segmentation of the body editing area (content area) into blocks offers an effortless user experience and native display of your content on all devices. It’s a break from the standard WYSIWYG editor with one big what you see what you get area.
Key Features
The body (content area) of articles, videos, and galleries is arranged into “blocks”. Writing in blocks is a bit like building the structure of your content with LEGO. Blocks are single components that you can use in the editor. You can look at them as separate content items each with specific functions and an editing panel to structure and customize your content.
Blocky lets creators highlight important passages, insert contextual widgets and football statistics, as well as combine various types of content inside the body of articles, videos, and galleries. You can create new “blocks” by selecting the Plus icon at the bottom of each block inside the body of your article, video or gallery. Also, you can rearrange blocks by dragging and dropping them.
There are several block choices you can add, including Paragraph, Image, Gallery, Article, Heading, Video, Odds widget, Compare odds, and more. To the user, all blocks behave in a consistent and familiar way, even if they provide tailored UIs for their controls.
Block features
Quick copy/paste of blocks
Blocky lets you select and copy/paste blocks at the bottom or top of the content you are working on.
To copy blocks:
Select the blocks you want to copy from the body of your post.
2. Then, select the Copy blocks button.
You can paste your selection either at the top or bottom of your content’s body.
3. To paste your blocks at the top, select Paste blocks at top.
4. To paste your blocks at the bottom, select Paste blocks at bottom.
Auto-linking
Auto-linking is a feature that makes the process of linking keywords in your posts faster and user-friendly.
The way auto-linking works is simple. When a user is done writing a paragraph inside the body of а post (article, video, or gallery), the system will analyze the text, extract all football entities–names of players, teams, stadiums, coaches, tournaments–and suggest them as keywords under each paragraph. Keywords can be linked inside the text of posts and send readers to pages set by your system operators.
An entity, or a keyword, can be either inserted when it first occurs in a paragraph or everywhere it occurs.
Also, you can manually or automatically insert entities inside paragraphs.
Note that keywords are extracted and suggested automatically based on an index built by your team.
Manual linking
While keywords are always extracted and suggested automatically under paragraphs, linking them can be manual or automatic.
When you link manually, you have more control over how keywords are linked inside paragraphs.
Linking in all paragraphs
You can manually insert suggested entities in all paragraphs. When you do that, you can choose to insert in all paragraphs either first occurrences or all occurrences of keywords.
If you select Insert first occurrences, keywords will be linked only the first time they appear inside of paragraphs.
If you select Insert all occurrences, keywords will be linked everywhere they appear in paragraphs.
Linking in a specific paragraph
Linking inside of a paragraph means that the actions you apply will be reflected only for that specific paragraph.
In the context of a single paragraph, you can either perform linking actions for the whole paragraph or manage how each keyword is linked.
If you want to add all occurrences of suggested keywords inside of a paragraph, select Add all. To add only first occurrences inside of a paragraph, select Add first occurrences.
If you want to manage how each keyword is linked inside of a paragraph, expand the keyword menu, and choose an action.
Automatic linking
In the case of automatic linking, all actions happen depending on how you set your process.
Link settings
As we mentioned earlier, linked keywords will send users to a webpage your administrators have set. It could be an URL to a statistical page or whatever you decide.
However, you can edit a link destination. Moreover, you can link the same keyword everywhere in your text, but send readers to different URLs. This is possible with the Do not auto-link option for every keyword.
For example, if you have inserted all occurrences of “Chelsea” inside of a paragraph, and you want to send readers to different locations when they click on each occurrence, select Do not auto-link for the occurrence you want and enter the URL you wish to send readers to.
Auto-tagging
Auto-tagging is a feature that is closely connected to the way entities are linked.
You can tag posts with Football Connections–teams, players. Entities detected from all paragraphs are suggested as keywords available to be added in Tags > Football Connections.
You can either add keywords separately or all at once.
Drag/drop of paragraphs
Blocky lets you reorder blocks with a drag/drop functionality.
To change the position of a block inside the body of your post, simply hold the top left corner and move the block.
Quick access to new blocks
To improve the speed of your work, we made adding blocks to the body of posts quicker. Under each block of Sportal365, you will find buttons for quick access to the most used blocks.
Note that the quick access buttons under each block let you add the same blocks as the ones under the Most popular category in the + menu.
Uninterrupted writing inside Text blocks
We’ve optimized Blocky to let you write quickly and without interruptions. Blocky scans, recognizes, and suggests sports entities under blocks without disrupting/refreshing the writing process.
For more information, see Explore blocks.