Cascade Implementation of Athletics Sites
Thursday, September 8th, 2011 at 10:45am -- Kat Liendgens
Most of our clients have implemented a significant number of sites in our Cascade Server CMS in order to streamline their content management processes. One of the most feature-heavy sites for higher education organizations tends to be the Athletics site, simply because there are so many components to it, such as a variety of sports and teams, frequently updated scores and articles, rosters, events and multimedia content. I thought I’d take a few minutes to highlight some of the features that you could implement.
Information Architecture
I recommend creating one overall Athletics site, containing dedicated sub-directories (folders) for each team, prefixed, where applicable, with the letter m or w to distinguish between men’s and women’s teams. Each team folder should have its own index page, as well as sub-folders for items such as roster, stats, images, etc. This structure ensures low maintenance and ease of use for the end user.
Home Page
Most Athletics home pages contain top stories across teams, which can be accomplished in several ways. For instance, you can automatically pull the most recent stories into an index block and display them in whatever layout you would like, such as a simple list or a photo-slider. If you would like to give the user the ability to flag whether a story was "home page material" rather than displaying current stories automatically, you can add radio buttons to the Metadata Sets, which the user would then check if they want the story to be displayed on the home page or team page as it becomes acute. Another common feature on athletics home pages is the display of upcoming schedules and recent results. If you already have RSS feeds in place that contain schedule and results information, you can simply parse the feed using a format and display the data on your page. Or, if you’re using Cascade Server to maintain your schedule and results, you can pull the information into the Index Block.
News/Stories
When designing your structured data for your news stories, one thing to keep in mind is that you would want to be able to associate each news article with one or more teams, so that stories can be shared across teams. For instance, if an article discusses the male and female Athlete of the Week, it can be associated with the two teams to which the athletes belong.
Schedule and Scores
You don't necessarily need home-grown or third party applications to maintain your schedule and capture results. You can provide your end users with "game" or "event" Asset Factories, so that they can quickly create a game or competition in the system, and enter all of the pertinent data, such as location, home game vs. away game, day/time, etc. In addition, you can add a "result" field, so that once the game is over, users can simply enter the score, and it will then automatically be moved to the results section of the page. This way, one event asset can be re-used and displayed in an "Upcoming Schedule" section or in a "Results" section, based on the presence of a final score. You may also want to give your users the ability to associate a news story with the event, as well as photos, so that when they click on a score, it would link them to the associated news article or related photos.
Roster
Cascade Server allows you to get as granular as you need to with regard to your roster pages. For instance, you can have a separate page for each athlete, on which you can use structured data to enter pertinent player information, and create a roster page on which you use an index block to display the list of athletes, with links to the individual pages.
Photos
Athletics sites tend to be fairly image-heavy, so it's a good idea to allow your users to upload photos within Cascade Server and tag them for specific teams and events. In addition, if you would like to encourage visitors to your website to upload their own photos and tag them in a similar way, you can do so with server-side scripts and bring the data into Cascade Server via web services. I would recommend implementing an approval workflow to make sure that all images submitted are vetted prior to being published to your site.
Wesleyan University, a Cascade client, does a fantastic job with their athletics site, which incorporates photos, schedule and results, sub-directories for teams and departments, and a top stories feed. Their design is also refreshingly clean with a simple navigation. Take a look at Wesleyan's Athletics site.
These are just a few of the features built into athletics sites using Cascade Server WCMS. What are some of the cool things that you have implemented on your Athletics site?
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