What's New in Cascade Server 5.0
Hannon Hill is proud to release the latest version of its content management software, Cascade Server 5.0! Boasting a variety of new features and improvements, this latest version of Cascade Server will significantly enhance the user experience. At the basic user level, enhancements range from individual changes, such as the exciting new Save as Draft feature, to more broad, system-wide improvements that will provide increased performance and accommodate a higher number of active users in the system at the same time.
Cascade Server will now provide system administrators easy access to product configuration files without requiring physical or shell access to the server. In other words, administrators must simply log into the CMS interface and will have access to all system configuration files. System administrators will also appreciate the support for application load balancing to scale the CMS to meet their growing performance needs.
For developers, the new database publishing feature will dramatically expand the opportunities for personalizing CMS content for website visitors. In addition, developers will notice that this new, powerful feature will increase their ability to integrate the product with third-party systems and extend its functionality as a server-side content delivery mechanism.
Cascade Server 5.0 remains a cutting edge technology platform that incorporates the best-of-breed frameworks. With the use of Hibernate, Cascade Server provides added multi-database compatible persistence and web application deployment. These new web technologies and improvements together translate to a dependable experience for all users of the product.
Features that make Users happy
Save As Draft
The Save as Draft feature allows users to periodically save drafts of assets that they are editing in order to return later to finish their work. This leads to increased efficiency among users by allowing them to be working on edits for multiple assets at once. By periodically saving drafts, users can lower the risk of accidentally losing their work in the event of a browser crash or accidental click that navigates them away from the asset editing interface. Draft functionality is enabled for all user roles and for all content types.
Faster Bulk Operations & Enhanced Reporting
Cascade 5.0 features more rapid folder copy, move, and delete operations. With deletion, for example, users do not need to wait for an asset to be deleted; instead, control is returned quickly to users, thereby, allowing them to continue working. Enhanced error reporting provides more detailed information about bulk operations to the user and are valuable for communicating the status of assets to users of the system.
Expanded Search Capabilities
The new CMS provides users with an expanded scope of search capabilities. The ability to search structured data, for instance, allows the user to search the content of data definition pages in addition to basic WYSIWYG content. This results in more comprehensive search results. Users will find that many use cases may be simplified by utilizing the Quick Search box introduced in the 4.0 series that has been re-architected to serve up more relevant results according to your search terms.
Features that make Administrators/Developers happy
Database Publishing
Web developers will realize a whole new world of options with database publishing including the ability to more easily tie Cascade Server into existing third-party applications (without the use of XML) and develop custom server-side logic. All of this translates into a streamlined ability to offer more personalized and real-time CMS content to website visitors. Similar to the general concept of our existing web services API, developers will be able to make use of their preferred language of choice to implement their own business rules for content delivery.
Database publishing is easy to set up by first installing an official MySQL 5.0 database provided by Hannon Hill in a location on your network that will be accessible by your server-side logic. Cascade Server will connect to this separate database via a new Database Publishing transport. Hannon Hill will officially document, maintain, and support the CMS-specific tables contained within the database through knowledgebase publications, product updates, and trouble tickets. Developers are free to add as many of their own custom tables to aid in third-party application development and integration.
At time of release for Cascade Server 5.0, the database publishing feature will not provide any out-of-the-box widgets, but clients may look to Hannon Hill to provide officially supported personalization components in the future that will make use of the new database publishing method. Likewise, Hannon Hill will not be providing any form of an API for third-party systems integrations. Developers, however, will have the maximum flexibility to implement the necessary databse tables in order to achieve custom systems integrations with the published CMS content. Whether your team's core competency is with .NET, PHP, Java, Ruby, ColdFusion, etc., Cascade Server 5.0 will offer a new level of flexibility for getting the job done.
System Configuration Files Moved Inside Cascade Server
System configuration files such as licenses and LDAP have been moved into the CMS interface which allows for easy updating of these files. No longer is physical or shell access to the server required to update these configuration files. Administrators may simply log into Cascade Server and have easy access to the following configuration files:
- Cascade licensing
- LDAP and other custom authentication
- Image editor licensing and configuration
- Custom Authentication configuration
- Publish trigger configuration
Smaller Memory Footprint
Cascade 5.0 has a reduced memory footprint thanks to a system-wide evaluation and optimization of core operations. Publishing and rendering, two core activities to the Cascade Server experience, have been fine-tuned to be much more memory efficient enabling administrators to get more out of existing hardware.Additionally, browsing around the system has been optimized to use less memory and minimize system load.
More consistent user experience under varying load conditions
More efficient data access patterns contribute to increased scalability. Background operations, such as publishing, will not affect the experience of users. More efficient data access patterns means fewer roundtrips to the database and faster transactions. The benefit of this smarter database traffic is that resources needed by all users remain in transactions for substantially less time.
Support for Application Load Balancing
Optionally, Cascade may be deployed in a load balanced setting behind an Apache web server enabling system load to be distributed across multiple machines interacting with the same database. An organization may improve performance by simply adding more servers. As the number of users grow and more demand is placed on the system, machines can be proportionally added to counter this demand. Load balancing also provides failover in that, if a single node goes down, users will be able to log back in immediately to another node without having to wait for a system reboot
Multi-platform Installer
A unified installation program for all platforms streamlines configuration options including the installation directory, port numbers, and memory allocation. The installer includes database configuration and connection tests for MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle. A text-based installer is available for Linux, which guides the system administrator through the same set of configuration options as the GUI-based installer. A traditional zip file for extraction and manual configuration is also available.
Enhanced Log Output for CMS Administrators
More detailed information is provided in logs to facilitate the support process including user ID, asset ID, and asset type. The user may directly benefit from this log by isolating a problem to a specific asset to determine if they are able to correct it internally. Indirectly, system administrators receive additional value from these enhanced logs as they accelerate the support process. Moreover, they enable the support team to troubleshoot problems promptly with far more descriptive information.