Cascade 6.10 now available: Facebook Connector, new Velocity Tools and more
Thursday, August 11th, 2011 at 3:00pm -- Bradley Wagner
Overview
Last week, Hannon Hill released the latest version of its flagship WCM product Cascade 6.10 with features targeted at all 3 types of users in Cascade: content contributors (end-users), developers, and administrators. We’re proud to say this release satisfied 121 votes on our user Idea Exchange! Highlights include:
- a Facebook Connector
- new tools for Velocity developers
- a filter box to quickly locate Users, Groups, and Roles
- a handy feature for linking between assets published to different web servers
The Facebook Connector allows end-users to automatically share information about newly published content to a Facebook page. It is based on our Twitter Connector -- initially released in 6.4 -- and is part of our continued effort to leverage popular Social Media tools to engage your audience through a variety of channels.
Increase your Velocity!
For Cascade developers, we’ve upgraded our Velocity engine to version 1.7 and added a number of new tools for developers including:
The goal is to allow developers to do more with less code. Here’s great example of how the Display Tool’s list() function can aid developers in outputting list or array contents more easily.
Before 6.10:
#set ($links = [“link1”, “link2”, “link3”])
#foreach ($link in $links)
#if ($velocityCount == $links.size)
$link
#else
$link |
#end
#end
In 6.10:
#set ($links = [“link1”, “link2”, “link3”])
$_DisplayTool.list($links, “ | ”)
Other notable improvements to Velocity include:
- Support for #break directives inside of #foreach loops
- Ability to treat arrays as Lists
- Better support for variable scoping inside of #foreach loops and macros
- $foreach.count, $foreach.first, $foreach.last, $foreach.hasNext loop variables
Check out our Script Formats documentation for examples of each of the new tools.
Also, join us for our upcoming Velocity webinar this Tuesday to learn more about the improvements available in 6.10.
Locate Users, Groups, and Roles faster
Administrator users let us know that looking for Users, Groups, and Roles was becoming unwieldy with enough of them in the system. In 6.10, we added a filter box to the users, groups, and roles interface to allow you to locate these objects by name (or full name or email for users). We also added “Full Name” and “Email” columns to the Users table.
Destination Web URLs and Mobile Outputs
In Cascade 6.8, we added the ability to publish page configurations to specific Destinations. This allowed users to publish their mobile page output, for example, to a different web server than their regular HTML page output. In 6.10, we’ve added a Web URL property to Destinations to help link to page outputs published to different web servers and consequently, different URLs.
Let’s take Hannon Hill’s own marketing Site as an example. It has the Site URL: http://hannonhill.com. Our services team recently created a mobile version of the Site that publishes to http://m.hannonhill.com. With 6.10, we can set the Destination Web URL for our mobile Destination to be http://m.hannonhill.com so that it overrides the Sites’ base URL.
That way, when we link to the mobile output of pages on our marketing, the link gets correctly written as http://m.hannonhill.com/<path/to/page>.html. Likewise, links from other Sites in Cascade to the mobile output of pages on the marketing site will use the Destination’s Web URL http://m.hannonhill.com instead of the Site URL.
Other improvements
Other features include an upgrade to the syntax-highlighting file editor, an upgrade to the PDF engine, and support for Tomcat 6. Check out the complete release summary on our Knowledge Base for more information.
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