Overview

Cascade 6.7 contains some pretty amazing new features including a Recycle Bin, Cross-Site Move and Copy, and Data Definition Blocks.  Alongside these major features is a plethora of UI improvements including a new Live View pane for Pages, unsaved edit warnings, an upgraded WYSIWYG editor, and many, many more.  Cascade also now supports Java 6 and SQL Server 2008 on the back-end and Chrome on the front-end.  See details below!

Recycle Bin

It's been a long time coming, but it's finally here.  Cascade 6.7 includes one of the most requested features ever: the Recycle Bin!  Users can now delete and restore assets in the system and avoid "Oops!" moments which cause lots of headaches.  A Recycle Bin is available in the Global Area as well as each Site individually.  The Recycle Bin features an automatic purge interval that will permanently delete items from the recycle bin after a given amount of time.  This interval is configurable in both the system preferences (which is applicable to the Global Area Recycle Bin) and for each Site.  

Cross-Site Move and Copy

As a part of our continuing effort to enhance Sites, it is now possible to move and copy assets between Sites.  This includes all Home Area assets as well as most Administration Area assets.  Large "sites" that exist in the Global Area can now be migrated into a Site using the Site Migration Wizard and then split up into smaller Sites via cross-site move and copy.  It is also much easier to refactor content into a common Site which enables better content reuse.

Move/Rename

Included with this feature is a new tab that is used to move and/or rename an asset.

The process of moving/renaming now makes it more clear to the User that moving and renaming can have a detrimental effect on the state of published content.  Moving and renaming also has its own ability associated with it which can be used to prevent certain Users from moving/renaming assets.

XHTML/Data Definition Blocks

XHTML Blocks have been upgraded to XHTML/Data Definition Blocks.  Like Pages, it is now possible to assign a Data Definition to what is formerly known as an XHTML Block.  This allows contributor Users to create Blocks using a structured format.  

Example Use Case

Contact information is highly structured content that can be broken up into specific fields like name, phone number and email address very easily in a Data Definition.  A content contributor can use a Data Definition Block to enter this content which can then be transformed by a number of different Formats in many different Configuration Sets, Templates, or Pages.  This ensures that copying and pasting of content is not necessary when putting the same contact information on different Sites.  In the past, this would be handled by using a Data Definition Page that was selected in an asset chooser of another Data Definition Page with a "Contact Information" field.  This is no longer necessary.  

Benefits of Data Definition Blocks include:

• Ability to assign structured content higher in the Page Region hierarchy

  Because Blocks can be assigned directly to Page Regions, it is now possible to assign structured blocks of content at a higher level in the Page Region hierarchy.  Specifically, Data Definition Blocks can be set at the Configuration Set level and then propagate down to Pages automatically.  This eliminates the process of assigning reusable structured content to a number of Pages individually.

• Allowing structured content to be assigned to any Page Region directly

  In the Past, reusable structured content would either have to be indexed by an Index Block or assigned to an asset chooser in a Data Definition Page.  This is no longer necessary because Blocks can be assigned to any region in a Page.  This, in turn, alleviates some of the overhead associated with indexing and transforming a larger amount of content. 

• No longer having to mark Pages as not publishable as is required when aggregating them into another Page via Page asset choosers   

  Because it is no longer necessary to use Page assets as containers for reusable structured content, the process of marking these reusable assets "not publishable" is no longer required because Blocks are not publishable assets.  This prevents accidental publishes of Pages that should not exist on the webserver.

3rd Party Software Support

In case you missed it in the Overview, Cascade 6.7 introduces support for new back-end technologies as well as a new web browser.  

Support has been added for:

• SQL Server 2008 for the database
• Java 6 for the application
• Google Chrome web browser

WYSIWYG Upgrade

Menu Bar and Help Improvements

The top menu bars and help links in Cascade have been updated to improve the user experience in the following ways:

• Help menu has been removed from the blue menu bar and has been converted into a dropdown in the top right menu under 'Help'.  This was a point of confusion in the UI for users when trying to determine where to get help.
• All help links (those in the help menu as well as contextual help links) will now open a new browser tab/window (depending on the browser) to avoid taking the User out of Cascade once clicked.
• 'Administration' blue bar menu item has been converted into a dropdown for faster navigation to Admin area components.
• The text 'Learn More' has been added to contextual help links to help Users understand the purpose of those links.
• The Quick-links menu has undergone a face-lift.  Icons are now displayed for all items.

SFTP and FTP Improvements

Live View

The Live View is a handy little feature for previewing the published version of a Page. This is useful for:

• Checking to see if the Page has been published yet
• Seeing the published URL of the Page
• Previewing the page with server side scripting enabled

As pictured below, Users will see a new pane on the Page View tab called "Live" which contains all outputs for that Page, a URL pointing to the location where the current Configuration of the Page is/would be published, and a frame displaying the actual content located at the generated URL.

Issues Resolved

Bug

• Able to add page configuration to page configuration set with same name as existing config
• FTP publishing "transmission error" when remote directory contains files with too many words
• Deleting the asset corresponding to the last item in a user's history causes null pointer when clicking 'Home' after integrate folder
• 'Paste from Word' functionality does not remove <link>, <meta> tags
• Publisher screen header always reads "Publisher Idle"
• '&' characters converted to '&amp;' within passthrough code sections
• Permissions problems publishing to Windows SSH Tectia SFTP Server
• Improve SFTP file writing to better preserve file permissions and ACL masks
• WYSIWYG adds extra lines to output
• Cascade does not respect group file permissions for unix filesystems.
• SFTP library ignores umask of user upon initial creation of assets on server
• Site Migration Wizard breaks history and asset tree
• Not all editable files have "Rewrite links in file" option available
• Default asset factories generated when creating a new Site are given incorrect path
• When Creating/Editing Publish Sets through web services the published files, pages, folders can only be referenced by path
• Removing LDAP config does not unschedule LDAP sync job
• Error on connection initialization of sftp publish: "The SFTP Subsystem could not be initialized"
• Problem trying to start workflow when the "Start Workflow" checkbox is disabled
• (S)FTP transport copy: packet size not copied
• Web Services edits/creates of Users allows creation with a Site Role assigned instead of a Global Role
• Copying a Database Transport does not copy the Site Id field

Improvement

• Use AJAX to refresh publisher status screen to prevent full page refreshes
• Upgrade Quartz to latest version
• Upgrade FTP library
• Implement new SFTP library for greater reliability
• Upgrade TinyMCE to version 3.3.6
• Focus users on specific default fields upon load of forms
• Make double-clicking in User/Group select boxes consistent
• Allow users to add multiple assets to and remove multiple from Publish Sets at one time
• Warn users of unsaved edits
• Allow user to Delete all messages from Messages screen
• Improve editing experience of Page Configuration in Configuration Sets 
• Make Help links open in new tabs
• Improve WYSIWYG image linking dialog
• Move Delete tab away from the Publish tab to avoid accidental Deletes
• Convert "Administration" menu item to a dropdown
• Blocks created with Asset Factories should retain block type of the base asset
• Add XML preview to all block types
• Improve editing of text files with [system-asset] links
• Add Move/Rename tab for all Home and Admin assets that facilitates moving and renaming
• Add warnings to delete screen when deleting expiration folder, block indexed folder, asset factory base asset
• Make LDAP synchronization jobs run serially
• Add "Rewrite links in file" and "Maintain absolute links when rewriting" properties to web services schema file asset
• Improve responsiveness of Quartz jobs by setting more reasonable repeat intervals
• Add additional response codes to External Link Checker success conditions to prevent false positives for broken links
• Add Default Site property to 'user' complex type in Web Services
• Make 'Display Name to System Name' plugin consistent with 'Title to System Name' plugin with regard to case
• Check 'Start Workflow' checkbox when copying / moving asset to folder with available Workflow Definition

New Feature

• Support for Java 6
• Recycle Bin
• Structured Data Blocks
• Google Chrome support
• Allow Moving/Copying of assets between Sites
• SQL Server 2008 Support
• Live Link Preview

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

SQL Server 2008

SQL Server 2008 is now supported by Cascade (for versions 6.7 and higher).  If upgrading to  SQL Server 2008, please follow our transition guide.

Web Services

The Cascade Server WSDL has changed with the release of 6.7.  It is recommended that all Web Services scripts be tested in a non-production environment before applying the upgrade to production.  Java web services scripts written using Axis should be recompiled against the latest WSDL.

Cascade API

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.