Technical Intro 1
I. Introduction
Welcome
Welcome to Cascade Server! These five technical intro guides are intended to guide you through the software as an administrator, stepping through the process of creating/importing an example site from start to finish. These guides are intended to offer hands-on learning and to prepare you for integrating your own site.
Using a CMS
Working with a content management system involves a paradigm shift when compared to managing web content in the traditional manner. With a CMS, content is centralized on a single machine and then published out to one or more web servers supporting as many websites and URLs as necessary. Incorporating numerous content contributors requires a different approach, because there are new items to take into account like workflow rules, specific metadata fields, and the interrelation of assets. Once the transition has been made to a CMS, managing content online is significantly more efficient and scalable.
If you have previously worked with include files or library items on a site, many of the concepts with templates and blocks will be familiar. An include file or a library item is a piece of content that is repeated across multiple pages – a copyright date at the bottom of every page is a common example. In the CMS, these common items are regions in the template where content is supplied by blocks (XML/HTML) and optionally transformed by stylesheets (XSL).
Asset organization in the system is nearly identical to managing a traditional site. Content is divided into folders, and assets are labeled accordingly. In the system, you can tag a specific folder as the root of a site and build the site out as needed. Publishing the content out to one or more servers is readily accomplished because the publishing components are independently managed as targets. At the publishing target level, you can supply as many server destinations as necessary, thereby pushing the content out to test, dev, and/or production machines. The system even allows you to publish content to external databases as well as remote file systems.
We hope you gain much value out of these technical intro guides and develop a solid footing with which you can readily begin managing your own sites in the system. Should you have any questions during the process, please feel free to call or email our support team and we’ll answer your questions immediately.
- Create a New Site
Learn how to create a new site - Publishing Content
Set up the new site for publishing - Users and Content Creation
Learn how to set up users, groups, and asset factories