Here you can check out the interests, thoughts, activities, opinions, and ideas of Hannon Hill’s team members. In the spirit of community, you’ll be able to get to know some new Hannon Hillians as well as familiar ones. Your contributions are more than welcome, and we hope that you enjoy this blog. We look forward to sharing our enthusiasm for the future of Hannon Hill with you! You can also view past blog entries in our Blog Archives.
With over 110 attendees already signed-up for the 2008 Cascade Server User's Conference, we're confident that this year's conference will be our best yet. Due to this overwhelming response, we're extending the registration deadline. Day-rate registration ($350.00) will continue to be available through Friday, September 12.
If you've already signed up for the conference, or plan on doing so in the next few days, make sure to pre-select your conference schedule! Doing so will allow you to pick the sessions you'll attend ahead of time, and choose sessions from both the business and technical tracks.
Additionally, for those who've already signed up, we've put together a shared conference attendee list that allows you to see who else is attending and get in touch with fellow participants prior to the conference. If you'd like to be included, and receive a copy of this list, please email Marketing Assistant Uran Piedra at uran.piedra@hannonhill.com.
If you haven't signed up for the 2008 Cascade Server User's Conference yet and are interested in learning more about what we have in store this year, be sure to visit the User's Conference page on our website, or go directly to our conference registration page. We look forward to seeing you in a few weeks!
**Please Note -- As we mentioned in our last conference update blog, as of September 1st, conference attendee cancellations are non-refundable.
The 2008 Cascade Server User's Conference is less than a month away, and we're working hard to make sure it will be a huge success. In our effort to do so, we'd like to inform you of a few important updates regarding this year's conference.
While we're excited about having 109 attendees registered for the conference, we understand that scheduling conflicts and other unforeseen circumstances may prevent some of our registrants from being able to attend. However, we wanted to let you know that after Monday, September 1st, 2008, we will not be able to refund cancellations for conference attendees.
Earlier this summer, we sent an email to all User's Conference registrants, asking if they'd like to be included on a shared list of attendees. If you missed out on it the first time around, but you would like to be included and receive a copy of the list, email your contact information to Marketing Assistant Uran Piedra at uran.piedra@hannonhill.com.
If you haven't signed up for the sessions you'd like to attend, or if you're just interested in checking out what we have to offer, be sure to visit the User's Conference page on our website.
We look forward to seeing you in a few weeks!
Dynamic navigation is important to the success of any website. By providing a logical and graphical representation of a website’s hierarchy, dynamic navigation tools allow websites to be more intuitive to visitors. In addition to helping visitors find their way around your website, dynamic navigation is also easy to manage on the back end.
In Cascade Server, dynamic navigation menus are created through the use of index blocks, which are blocks that index the content of a specified folder or portion of the site. Since index blocks dynamically update content, whenever new content is created or content is modified, the changes will automatically be reflected in the navigation across your site.
In Cascade Server, there are six main types of dynamic navigation:
Menus: - Navigation menus are created to provide visitors with links to different areas of the site. They can simply link to the site's primary areas, include more in-depth sub-levels of pages, or even expand as visitors navigate deeper into the site.
Breadcrumbs: - Dynamic breadcrumbs show a backwards trail of links, from the current page back to the homepage, which help visitors understand where they are within a site's hierarchy.
Previous/Next: - Previous/Next navigation links allow visitors to quickly and easily access related pages without having to click back through a directory; this allows for a more cohesive and streamlined experience when viewing content.
Recent Pages: - Adding a Recent Pages list to your site provides a way to present recently added content, such as blog posts or press releases, in a summarized and easily viewable format.
Site Map: - Site maps provide an aggregated and comprehensive outline of all pages within a site, so visitors may quickly find and navigate to pages they're looking for, or browse the content of your site.
Site Index: - A site index provides an alphabetical listing of every page on a site, and links to those pages as well, enabling visitors to quickly find exactly they are looking for.
All of the aforementioned dynamic navigation elements are easy to set up in Cascade Server. For example, to create Breadcrumbs, a type of dynamic navigation that typically appears on every page (except the index), simply create an index block with the following options:
These options will create a usable index block that can then be plugged into a page region at the template, configuration set, or page level. Breadcrumbs typically don't change throughout a site, so it's easiest to go ahead and add it at the template level, so that it will appear on all pages.
Additionally, Cascade allows you to style the results rendered by these index blocks by applying an XSL stylesheet. **Note -- If you are already using and/or demoing Cascade Server, examples of stylesheets are included with the system and can be found in: /common/stylesheets/index
With 93 attendees already registered, this year’s Cascade Server User’s Conference is sure to be our best yet! Held this year at the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center in Atlanta, GA on September 22-23, we’re thoroughly excited about the great facility, the conference sessions, and all of the other highlights we have in store for all our attendees this year.
As we've announced over the past few weeks on our Team Blog, accommodations at the conference site are sold out. However, we do have availability at a hotel within walking distance of the GTHCC. So if you’re interested in attending the conference, it’s not too late! We'll keep day-rate registration available until September 1st. If you want to attend, sign up for Day-Rate registration on our site, and call Marketing Associate Sam Beresford for help and assistance with setting up your accommodations. He can be reached at (678) 904-6900 x191.
We look forward to seeing many new and familiar faces in September!
As many of you may have noticed (by visiting the User's Conference section of our site), we've completely sold out of rooms at the Georgia Tech Hotel & Conference Center, the site of our 2008 Cascade Server User's Conference. But fear not! For those still interested in attending, registration for day rate attendees is open through September 1st. Just visit the User's Conference sign-up page, register as a day rate attendee (which covers conference admission, breakfast, lunch, snacks, and our Monday night open house dinner), and then give me a call (see below). We've made arrangements to secure rooms at a hotel within walking distance of the GTHCC, and I can put you in touch with them.
For those of you interested in getting a head start, we'll be sending out a conference attendee list later this month, which will include the names, organizations, and contact information for attendees who chose to be included. It'll be great for those of you who'd like to catch up with colleagues from last year's Conference or make some new connections in anticipation of this year's. If you'd like to be included on this list and receive it, please email your contact information to Uran Piedra at uran.piedra@hannonhill.com.
As always, let me know if you have any questions or need more information, and we look forward to seeing you in Atlanta on September 21-23!
Sam Beresford
sam.beresford@hannonhill.com
678-904-6900 x191
As makers of proprietary installed CMS software, we constantly run into prospects looking for the content management system that's right for their organization. However, oftentimes these prospects are unsure as to whether to go with an open-source or proprietary system. While there are some similarities between the two, there are also stark differences between an open-source and installed CMS system that should be considered in the CMS selection process. As is the case with most substantial business-investments, one factor that must always be considered is business risk mitigation and how your organization can avoid taking on unnecessary risks.
Flexibility & Cost
One of the 'pros' when utilizing an open source CMS system is that you are provided with extreme flexibility. This is because open-source systems provide the framework for you to build your entire CMS structure as you see fit.
However, along these same lines, this requires both extensive technical knowledge and a complete reliance on individuals from within your organization (or those to whom you outsource your work) to complete. Because open-source solutions are license-fee free, many organizations searching for a CMS are drawn to the low-cost option afforded to them with use of an open-source system. However, there are many "hidden" costs associated with this decision, because although the system is essentially free, the amount of human labor and energy needed to build and customize it is substantial. As costs of technology and hardware continue to diminish over time, costs of labor are perpetually rising. This is something to fully consider before going the open source route.
In addition, although the cost of purchasing proprietary software is higher than that of its open source counterpart, remember -- you are paying for something. Proprietary CMS software comes with a plethora of default and customizable options already set up in the system. This means creating new pages, templates, folders, dynamic navigation and the like is much simpler, as the default and standard structure needed to do so is already in place. If you'd like to accomplish the same with an open source system, (most of which lack comprehensive defaults and examples 'out of the box'), it requires starting from scratch and building out your entire CMS structure.
Should your developers one day find that they aren't able to build and/or customize your instance as anticipated, the next major issue to think about is product support.
Support
Imagine you decided to select an open source CMS. Although you may be aware of the risk of using an open source system, you're pretty confident your developers can make it happen. One day though, something in the system goes terribly wrong and needs immediate attention. Who do you call? Unfortunately, I can't answer that question for you. (In fact, take a look at the results when I searched the word 'support' on Joomla's site).
When you make a commitment to an open source system, realize that you are choosing to forfeit the immediate access to a support staff that you'd be getting with a proprietary investment. Maintenance and support are almost always included when purchasing an installed CMS license. This will typically include direct access (via phone or email) to a dedicated support team, in addition to access to an automated support (and/or 'ticket') system, user's forum, and listserv. Because use and maintenance of a CMS is always complex, the intangibles, like knowing you have someone to immediately contact for help, are crucial.
Additional Nice-To-Haves
Search Engine Optimization
Many CMS systems in general, whether open source or proprietary, leave much to be desired when it comes to SEO endeavors. Open source systems in particular, usually fail to provide the ability to create search engine friendly urls. In addition, to ensure ease of use for content contributors within your organization, utilizing a system that provides page level control over things like titles and metadata is crucial.
Accessibility Compliance
Where with many proprietary CMS systems, functionality such as accessibility checker(s) that ensure valid site HTML/XML is included, this same feature set is not available with open source options. More recently, web accessibility has become even more relevant with ground-breaking litigation and legal precedents being set for those who are not compliant with accessibility standards. The risk of maintaining a non-accessible site is now legally significant; for this reason, if using an open source system (or a proprietary one that doesn't ensure web accessibility), making sure that you have extremely accessibility-saavy developers will be important.
As Services Trainer for Hannon Hill, clients often ask me how to group a list of articles by category. XSLT 1.0, the version of the XML-based language used in Cascade Server, doesn't have easy-to-use grouping capabilities, but we can take advantage of other features in this version that will allow us to create groups. This technique is called Muenchian Grouping, after Steve Muench at Sun Microsystems.
Here's how to do it:
First, we will assume that you are going to group by a dynamic metadata field named "Category." The parts of an index block that we're concerned with matching look like this (a simplified version of a real index block):
Assume there are many more pages and more categories than above; there are no reasonable limits to the number of pages you can sort or categories you can group by.
The next thing we need is an XSLT stylesheet to match this index block. This first sample will list the pages in folder order. For simplicity's sake, we won't worry about subfolders or providing links to the pages; we'll just show the pages' Display Name in a list:
Now we need some way to figure out, of all the pages in the index block, which categories are present. XSLT 1.0 provides the xsl:key element that does just that, so we're going to add one just after the xsl:stylesheet element in the above example. I'll just show the xsl:key element below, but at the end of this post I'll show the completed stylesheet:
After this, we need to be able to find all the pages in a particular category. This can be done with the XPath function key. An example:
But what we really need is a way to create a heading for each category, and then list all the pages in that category. In Muenchian Grouping, we'll know that we should add a category heading when we've run out of pages in one category, and we're moving onto the first page in the next category. “What?” you may be saying. We're going to sort all the pages by category, and then display a header before the first page in each category. We'll do that by adding this to the stylesheet:
Feel free to ask questions in the comments, but what that code literally says is, “for each page in the total list of pages (sorted by category), check if it is the same page as the first page with the same category in the key named ‘pages-by-category’. Then display a heading with the category name.” If that explanation ties your brain in knots as much as it tied my fingers, don't worry; you'll just need to follow this pattern when you create your own grouping.
After finding the first page in the category and displaying a heading, we need to display a list of pages in that category, sorted by Display Name:
The key ('pages-by-category', …) should look familiar. It's like the key ('pages-by-category', 'Oranges') I showed above, except this time it gives a list of all the pages in the current category (from the previous for-each element, the one with generate-id() in it). Then, the apply-templates element passes each page to the system-page template, which will be just like what I showed in the no-grouping, original stylesheet.
That's it. Those are all the techniques for grouping pages (or any other XML element). The complete stylesheet is below, though you'll probably need to change the text anywhere it says "Category" or "display-name," to customize it for your specific implementation. Ask any questions in the comments!
The release of Cascade Server 5.5 was an exciting one for the Hannon Hill team, as it included some important new features focused solely on enhancing the overall user experience with Cascade. Last week, we told you about Content Types, which allow users to easily apply a predefined type, such as a Blog Post or Press release, to a particular page of content while maintaining consistency among other pages of the same Content Type. Today, we’re highlighting another great feature from our recent release, Customizable Roles.
Customizable Roles enable administrators to change the default capabilities of each of the five user roles in Cascade. Complete customization of these capabilities is now available, which allows for more administrative flexibility than ever before in managing roles and their duties in areas such as Administration, Security, Home Area, Publishing, and Workflows.
To modify the capabilities of one of the 5 roles in Cascade:
In addition to the Customizable Roles feature, we’ve also added a couple of new user preferences. Users can now specify whether or not the left navigation asset tree will appear by default upon login, and users with the ability to bypass workflows can now also specify whether or not those workflows will be bypassed by default.
The bad news -- July 15th, the registration deadline for the 2008 Cascade Server User's Conference, has come and gone.
The good news -- we still have five three two one room left!
Yep, that's it. When we first decided to hold this year's User's Conference at the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center, we reserved a fairly conservative number of rooms. Along the way, as the registrations came pouring in and demand increased by the week, our friendly sales manager at the GTHCC graciously accomodated our requests for more rooms. And then some more rooms. And then a few more rooms after that.
Recently though, our luck ran out. We've reserved all the rooms we can. After these ones are gone, we'll only be able to guarantee day rate admission and offer recommendations for other comparable hotels in the area. As for rooms at the GTHCC, however, this is your last call. If you're interested, please e-mail Uran Piedra at uran.piedra@hannonhill.com for details.
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