» #Cascade: User conference notes from Cascade Server Roadmap
Notes from Cascade Server Roadmap
Bradley Wagner, Director of Engineering, Hannon Hill
Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 9:00am
Four Themes for Cascade 5 Series in 2008
- User experience enhancements
- Enterprise deployment features
- Popular issues
- Distinct features vs. patch releases
User Experience Enhancements
- Quick links for fast access (v. 5.1)
- Drag and drop folder reordering (v. 5.2)
- Drag and drop publish queue reordering (v. 5.2)
Enterprise Deployment Features
Allowing the application to scale with your institution
- Database publishing (v. 5.0)
- Load balancing support with Tomcat/Hibernate (v. 5.0)
- Content Types for pages (v. 5.5)
Popular Issues
- Save as Draft (v. 5.0)
- Editable roles (v. 5.5)
- 30+ voted on features, improvements, and bug fixes included in v. 5.7
Distinct Features Vs. Patch Releases
Release strategy: Feature v. Patch Release - to release new functionality in scheduled quarterly releases and provide timely patch releases in the interim.
Cascade 5 Series Adoption
- ~66% of our 150 customers are using 5 series in production
Enhancements in 5.7
- AJAX left navigation
- Type ahead search with relevancy sorting
- Content Type Indexes
Great for pulling only the content you need from folders across multiple sites — example, “most recent.” vs. indexing large folder of everything just to get those results.
- Link anchors
Anchor insertion and editing
- WYSIWYG upgrade
- Full screen edit mode
- Full Safari 3 support
- Tiny MCS provides fixes for lots of bugs
- Script Formats
- The term stylesheets is being phased to “XSLT Formats” — name change being phased in to introduce “Script Formats”
- Script Formats: when XSL is too much; backed by Apache Velocity templating engine. Style of scripting similar for developers of PHP, Perl, etc.
- Content Type Index + Script Formats: more efficiency
Themes for 2009
- Scaling Cascade Server Deployments
- Lowering the learning curve
- Providing solutions for the social web
Innovations for 2009
- Allow role creation
- Add permissions to access control lists
- Tailor new roles on a site-by-site basis
Transport Containers added in v. 5.7
Site Features
- Formal site component: site contains ins own Folders and admin area components
- Only assets relevant to the site are visible
- Users can belong to multiple sites in the CMS and switch between them
Site-specific Settings
- Site level url: allows links between sites deployed to possibly different web servers
- Site specific content preferences
- WYSIWYG toolbar
- CSS and CSS classes
- Tidy, spellcheck, link check
Allows for more fine-grained control to empower site managers
Long Term Site Goal
- Sites supplant Target as the object that binds Home area assets and administration components together
Template decoupled from Target to all from template re-use
Lowering the Learning Curve
Menu Blocks
- Combine common index blocks and formats (XSLT or script)
- Want to create menus with no XSLT and minimal number of options in a simple user interface
- breadcrumbs
- next/previous
- selected objects
- context navigation
Providing Ideas for the Social Web
Sites as interactive web apps:
- Personalization
- favorites
- watchers
- Community Features
- user comments/discussions
- ratings
- idea exchange
- blogs
- tags
- wikis
Cascade Delivery Server
- Now: Push CMS: Cascade 5 is strictly a push CMS that pushes files to a third party delivery server
- Future: Push/Pull CMS: Cascade Delivery Server will provide ability to directly serve up site content
About Cascade Delivery Server
- Optional product
- Simple enabling Cascade Delivery Server from within Cascade Server
- Content served up by Cascade with the same URL
- Can be enabled from specific site
Why?
- Pull model has gained a lot more traction in recent years as CMS apps have become more stable
- Allows for instantaneous updating (example: events calendar)
- Allows for easy incorporation of personalization and community features
Future Cascade Development Server Innovations:
Live site modules
- Inject easily pluggable, configurable modules for:
- Dynamic content harvesting (calendar, search)
- Personalization (favorites, watchers)
- Community (comments/discussions, ratings, ideas, exchanges)
Push and Pull
Cascade will still be a great push CMS for maintaining organization controlled content
- Main corporate site
- Course catalog
- News and Press Releases
Cascade Development Server will be great for interactive community sites (example: knowledge base)
Benefits for All
- Delivery engine requires a consolidated rendering content cache to deliver the speed
- All users will benefit from faster load page times for in-application…. [check slides for more info]
Customer Influenced Road Map
Voting your opinions
- Growing JIRA Feature Projects
- Feature idea exchange in customer success community
- Ned to talk? Contact Chris Armistead or the support staff