What are Direct Timelines?

As Pugpig Bolt has grown into its role as the leading mobile platform. We’re adding a new, optional method for delivering your content to users in your Pugpig Bolt app. Called Direct Timelines, this allows you to leverage your own website’s curation and delivery with our best-in-class content experience and functionality. You’ll be able to replace the existing timeline view with a section or other similar page from one of your own properties and seamlessly link to the relevant content that’s been processed through our Express CMS.

This feature is largely designed for customers with substantial in-house teams and subsequent turnover in the features, content and/or appearance of these pages. These might include short-lived features and functionality or rapid design iterations.

This document lays out the fundamentals of how this feature-set will work. 

Link handling

Direct Timeline to content

The links between direct timelines and our version of the content will utilize our existing redirect service. This currently handles making sure deeplinks to your website URLs open to the correct locations in app but works just as well handling links internally.

Direct Timeline to other Timeline/Direct Timeline

A case here might be a homepage with section labels that tap through to other direct timelines. Our redirect service also handles this, with the user being taken to that timeline in the correct tab.

Content that isn’t yet, or won’t be, processed through Express

We already handle this to account for things like breaking news push notifications. In these cases the redirect service cannot find the correct destination and will open the original (your) URL without extra context, such as a timeline, but still within the app.

Paywalling

To ensure a consistent experience in the app, and not breach App Store/Play Store guidelines we aim to use our existing wherever required. Any content that’s in feeds we’re ingesting can still be marked as free or paid using existing mechanisms. 

For screens or content that aren’t, our intention is to read the page metadata and determine whether or not we should display our paywall or not. We're going to leverage JSON-LD for this, as a globally-accepted standard that most of you will be using already. For paywalling in particular the isAccessibleForFree property. If this is true the content will be paywalled, if not our usual Bolt paywall will appear over it.

Swiping between content

Swiping between articles will require additional context to be passed to the app, detailing the URLs of the content and the order they're in. If you're able to provide it we'll use the JSON-LD property itemList to tell us this order. Note that we currently don't plan to include this in the initial version of this feature. 

Offline behaviour 

As these pages are being served from your domain, there'll be minimal offline support for direct timelines. Articles that have been ingested via express and viewed by the user will remain available offline, just as they currently do.

Analytics

The app will continue to feature any analytics SDKs you use and direct timelines will send screenview events, but probably nothing more than that. Any analytics tags you have on those pages should fire as they would outside the app unless explicitly instructed not to by you.

Consent and Advertising

Advertising on direct timelines will be served through your own ad units, as they would on the web. We will still integrate with the Google Mobile Ads Webview SDK to register these screenviews as coming from the app, this is important for enabling programmatic via AdSense and should result in a higher yield.

From a consent perspective, we support a native CMP SDK passing the consent status through to the timeline. This means users won't be presented with additional consent screens presented by the timelines themselves and will be correctly and consistently implemented across the app. This will require a small .js file, provided by us, to be included on pages that are served in-app from your domain.