Highlights of Cascade Server 5.7:

• Content Type Index Blocks and New Block Icons
• AJAX Left Hand Navigation
• Script Formats and New Format Icons
• TinyMCE Upgraded
• NEW "New" Menu
• Type Ahead Search
• Permissions Performance Improvements
• Transport Containers and New Transport Icons

Content Type Index Blocks and New Block Icons

A new type of Index Block has been added in Cascade Server 5.7. Content Type Index Blocks allow rapid indexing of all Pages that use a particular Content Type. The index is rendered without any Folder structure and all Pages appear at the root of the index. A Content Type Index is great for aggregating content of a particular type from across a number of different folders without having to pull in other Pages of different types.

Now, when creating or editing an Index Block, there is an option to choose its type. The old index blocks have an Index Type of Folder Index and the new block type has an Index Type of Content Type Index.

They also have an additional option that folder index blocks do not have: sort order that can be either ascending or descending. They cannot be rendered by "Folder Order" since the assets in the Index are not being grouped by Folder.

New icons have also been added to allow users to distinguish between Index, XML, XHTML, Text, and Feed Block types without having to render or edit the block itself.

AJAX Left Hand Navigation

The left-hand navigation menu in both the Home and Administration areas of Cascade now uses AJAX to populate container contents. Users can now click on the '+' and '-' icons to expand/collapse the left-hand navigation without causing the entire page to reload. Page reload will only occur once the user clicks on the name of an asset.

This is great for users who know exactly what asset they are looking for and want to navigate right to it.

Script Formats and New Format Icons

Overview

A new content transformation type has been added in Cascade Server 5.7. Previously, users were required to learn and employ XSL to transform block, structured data, or xhtml content in a page. Now it is possible to create a new type of transformation asset called a Script Format that can be applied at the page region level in the same way that a stylesheet can be applied. The content of a Script Format follows the Velocity Template Language syntax.

Script Formats can be applied at the region level of Templates, Pages, and Page Configuration Sets' Page Configurations.

Velocity Resources

Velocity is a templating engine created by the Apache Group. In contrast to XSL which is declarative, Velocity is a procedural language and should look familiar to people with PHP, Perl and Python experience. 

The content supplied to the region is the same content that you have access to with XSL except that it is accessed through the functions of the JDOM API. The main context object and entry point in the data is called the "contentRoot" and it is a JDOM Element.

Here is a short code example of an XSL that outputs an unordered list of links to all the pages and folders under the root element of an index block.

Here is code that will produce the same result using Velocity and JDOM.

Stylesheets are XSLT Formats

With the addition of this feature, it has been decided that the term 'stylesheet', which is currently used to refer to an XSL transformation asset, will no longer be used. Moving forward, the term 'Format' will be used to describe assets which format content and the term 'Stylesheet' will be supplanted by 'XSLT Format' to go along with 'Script Format'.

New icons have also been added to allow users to distinguish between Format types.

TinyMCE Upgrade

The new WYSIWYG editor, TinyMCE 3, comes with tons of bug fixes and useful new features and improvements.

Features/Improvements:

• Added support for anchor insertion/editing during link creation. This has been one of the most requested improvements to the WYSIWYG.
  
• Link/Image Pop ups are not new windows anymore but floating divs, which alleviates the problem with web browser pop up blockers.
• Added new "Full screen" button was added to make it easy for users to edit large documents. Pasting from word and code cleaning has been improved. 
• Toolbar buttons have been grouped in a more intuitive manner. 
• TinyMCE 3 solidifies Safari 3 support.

NEW "New" Menu

Two important improvements were made to the New menu in the top global navigation bar to enhance the user experience. The menu will scroll if the height of the menu exceeds the browser height. This improvement works in all of our supported browsers. The menu loads with the page so there is no delay when loading the menu for the first time after a page load.

Type Ahead Search

Users can view search results instantly while typing search terms into the search box. Type-ahead search results are grouped by asset type with a maximum of 4 most relevant assets per type. This number can be modified in the user's preferences section. When a user clicks on the "List All" link, all the results will be displayed.

Before attempting to use the Type Ahead Search, please have an Administrator rebuild the Search index (Tools > System > Searching and Indexing).

Permissions Performance Improvements

Cascade implementations relying on a large number of Group and User entries in the access control lists in the Access tab will experience greatly improved performance when loading the left hand navigation, container contents, and assets themselves. Permissions checks will no longer consume large amounts of memory and the navigation response time has been decreased in some cases by a significant amount.

Implementations that use very few Groups and Users in their access control lists may see a slight decrease in performance, but as more ACLs are added the system will continue to scale gracefully.

Transport Containers and New Transport Icons

Transport Containers are no longer immutable. Users can create/edit/copy/delete Transport Containers. These containers will function like any other Administration area container.

New icons have also been added to allow users to distinguish between Transport type.

Issues Resolved in 5.7

New Feature

• [CSCD-4190] - Type ahead search in the search box
• [CSCD-4368] - New Index Block Type: Content Type Index
• [CSCD-4403] - Add "Toggle fullscreen mode" button to the WYSIWYG
• [CSCD-4404] - Allow users to add anchors when inserting/editing links to CMS content in the WYSWIYG
• [CSCD-4405] - Script Formats: New object type for transforming region content
• [CSCD-4448] - AJAX enabled left hand side navigation
• [CSCD-4497] - Allow creation of new Transport Containers

Improvement

• [CSCD-4135] - Upgrade TinyMCE from 2.x to 3.x
• [CSCD-4430] - Make insert image, insert link and HTML Source buttons open a floated div instead of opening a pop up window (WYSIWYG)
• [CSCD-4454] - Inappropriate empty formatting tags in the WYSIWYG should be stripped on submission
• [CSCD-4461] - Relegate Permissions/ACL checking to the database when loading container contents
• [CSCD-4463] - Should be able to view dashboard when user has thousands of messages
• [CSCD-4502] - Add webservices for Transport Containers
• [CSCD-4616] - Prevent deletion of Transports used by Destinations
• [CSCD-4672] - "New" Menu Usability: Menu loads asynchronously when first clicked on page load
• [CSCD-4674] - New Block icons to distinguish block types

Task

• [CSCD-4531] - Remove "output as zip" option for transports

Bug

• [CSCD-2082] - "New" Menu Usability: Menu does not scroll when menu heigh exceeds browser height. Assets unreachable.
• [CSCD-2591] - Input tags have 'value' attributes stripped in IE
• [CSCD-3996] - WYSIWYG link properties are not populated upon edit
• [CSCD-4005] - Anchor links not supported <a> tags or system-asset pseudo-tags when clicked in CMS
• [CSCD-4010] - Cascade installer does not allow for setting of Oracle SID
• [CSCD-4088] - Folder option defaults to "Base Folder" when inserting an internal image or hyperlink.
• [CSCD-4090] - WSYIWYG links rewritten incorrectly to include URL to local CMS instance
• [CSCD-4111] - Incorrect file creation behavior - submitted text overwrites uploaded file data
• [CSCD-4166] - Users can edit working copy of assets that are checked out by another user
• [CSCD-4172] - Safari 3.1+ cannot render more than 1 WYSWIYG on a form
• [CSCD-4219] - Data definition preview or edit mode for 2 consecutive wysiwygs displays the second wysiwyg as a plain multi-line text field
• [CSCD-4392] - File chooser and page chooser show base folder when clicked (WYSIWYG)
• [CSCD-4394] - Asset chooser in "Insert/edit link" tool throws exception when clicked more than once (WYSIWYG)
• [CSCD-4499] - Coordinate attributes in <area> tags not handled properly in IE
• [CSCD-4557] - Deleting a target impossible soon after deleting its subscriber templates
• [CSCD-4558] - Asset chooser causes error when the last asset in the history is a base folder
• [CSCD-4562] - Single quotes in HTML comments in WYSIWYG are converted to double quotes
• [CSCD-4603] - Publishing will not work for other destinations if earlier destination has no Transport
• [CSCD-4679] - Sort Versions by Last Modified
• [CSCD-4681] - Error thrown when clicking "Upload" in Upload pane of File Chooser before selecting a file to upload
• [CSCD-4687] - Asset Factory placement folder not set by default on create when inside a subfolder of the placement folder and "allow sub-folder placement" is not enabled

Upgrading to Cascade Server 5.7 from 5.5.2

Before attempting to upgrade, please perform the following steps:

1. Re-compile Custom Plugins -- The Cascade Server Plugin API has been modified and will require that all custom plugins be recompiled using the updated API libraries. This includes Asset Factory plugins, Publish Triggers, Custom Authentication modules. As with all upgrades, please test all custom plugins in a test environment before deploying them to a production server. Instructions explaining how to deploy plugins can be found in the general upgrade guide.
   • Asset Factory Plugin ( Documentation | SDK | API JAR )
   • Publish Trigger ( Documentation | SDK | API JAR )
   • Custom Authentication ( Documentation | API JAR )
2. Test/Update Web Services Scripts with latest WSDL -- The Cascade WSDL API has changed; therefore, all web services scripts must be re-compiled (if using Axis stub classes generated using WSDL2Java) and tested in a test environment. Most scripts will not require any code changes, but stub classes will need to be re-generated and re-compiled.
3. After taking any pertinent actions listed above, please see our general upgrade guide for step-by-step upgrade instructions.

After applying the upgrade, please preform the following steps:

1. Rebuild your search index (Tools > System > Searching and Indexing) before attempting to use Type Ahead Search.

Upgrading to Cascade Server 5.7 from 5.5.1 and earlier

Please follow every available release Upgrade Guide for every version you skipped during the upgrade including the guide above.