Blogs - January 2011
Below are the blog entries for January 2011
Happy New Year from Hannon Hill: Top 10 2011 Blog Posts
By Holly Wright
Thursday, December 29th, 2011 at 4:00pm
Here, here, here, the best time of the year! As we quickly approach 2012, I wanted to use this last post of the year to wish all our clients a Happy New Year and to share the blog posts from 2011 that got the most reads this year (and a few festive holiday photos...).
In the spririt of the New Year's Eve countdown, here are the top 10 most popular non-user conference posts, with number one being the most read. I should acknowledge that posts published earlier in the year do have an obvious advantage here, but nonetheless, here they are:
10. 5 CMS Predictions for 2012, by Kat Liendgens (December 8)
9. Spotlight on Cascade Entity Relationship Diagram, by Charlie Holder (September 2)
8. Separating Media Files from Content Management, by Kat Liendgens (April 25)
7. Things to Remember When Selecting a Web CMS, by Joel Dixon (June 9)
6. How to Use Google+ for Higher Ed, by Holly Wright (November 10)
5. HighEdWeb 2011: Why (Quality) Content is King & Accessibility is Key, by Joel Dixon and Penny Harding (November 2)
4. 9 Reasons to Create a Dynamic Online Magazine, by Holly Wright (June 20)
3. Don't Surrender to the Render, by Tim Reilly (March 24)
2. The Eternal Debate: Velocity or XSLT, by Rahul Bhagnari (August 31)
1. Designing a Page Output for Mobile Devices, by Rahul Bhagnari (March 17)
To wrap up the year, I also thought I would share some of the fun photos of festive Hannon Hillers celebrating the holidays in style. First up is our Christmas tree, complete with many hand-crafted ornaments made by Hannon Hillers themselves. Check out some of the beauties:
A couple of weeks ago, we had a Tacky Christmas Sweater day in the office. The theme was thoroughly embraced and we took the perfect family holiday photo on the stairs of our office:
Finally, to really cap off a wonderful year, we had our holiday party at the Georgia Aquarium. We have a somewhat casual work environment here at Hannon Hill, so it was fun to see everyone in formal attire. Take a look below at some of the best shots of the team.
This is it. The last post of 2011. Happy New Year to all our clients, partners and other readers and to the higher education community. We look forward to an even more amazing 2012!
Stay tuned for the first post of 2012: Hannon Hill's 2012 New Year's Resolutions, from CEO Kat Liendgens.
Category
- Resources
- Events
Utilizing the Custom Asset Factory Plug-in API
By Brent Arrington
Tuesday, December 27th, 2011 at 4:00pm
Asset Factories provide one of the most powerful tools in managing site and group-specific content creation in Cascade Server. Asset Factory Plug-ins add to this tool by incorporating extended, automated functionality into the creation of specialized assets.
Cascade comes pre-configured with a number of built-in Asset Factory Plug-ins available, providing functionality such as automated naming of assets, image re-sizing and validation based on file names or extensions, to name just a few. While these built-in plug-ins provide enough extended functionality to cover most common content creation use cases, Cascade also provides a simple API for creating your own custom Asset Factory Plug-ins for more advanced functionality or use cases more specific to your own particular business process. However, while the custom Asset Factory Plug-in API offers tremendous extensibility and flexibility, it remains a very under-utilized feature of Cascade Server. This post seeks to change that.
Asset Factory Plug-in SDK Setup
Admittedly, tackling a custom plug-in project from scratch can seem a bit daunting, but luckily there are some resources available to assist in getting started. A complete Eclipse sample project is available on the Hannon Hill Github site. There is also very thorough documentation available on the Cascade Server Knowledge Base, which walks through the entire process, beginning with assembling the necessary development tools, all the way through to installation and trouble-shooting of the plug-in in a Cascade instance.
Complete, Real World Examples
Perhaps another barrier to attempting custom plug-in development is the dearth of working, real-world examples from which to learn. The establishment of the Hannon Hill Github account has begun to foster a community of code sharing among HH clients and staff, and we now have a repository dedicated specifically to real-world plug-in examples.
Asset Fields to System Name Plug-in
The first contribution to this new repository is a project containing two distinct custom plug-ins. The first of these, Asset Fields to System Name Plug-in, extends some of the functionality available via existing built-in plug-ins to allow for automated naming of assets based on any combination of wired metadata, custom metadata and/or data definition field values. While existing plug-ins allow for auto-naming based on Display Name, Title or specified Data Definition fields, independent of one another, this plug-in offers the flexibility of constructing an auto-generated system name based on a combination of any of these, not to mention other wired and custom metadata fields not accessible in any of the above.
Asset Fields to Folder Structure Plug-in
The second plug-in in this project, Asset Fields to Folder Structure Plug-in, allows for automated folder placement of assets (within sub-directory structures of the selected placement folder) based on any combination of metadata or data definition field values. One potential use for this plug-in is in organizing date-based directory structures for news or blog sections. An Asset Factory could be configured with a Placement Folder setting of /news or /blog, and this plug-in could be applied to place the asset based on a custom "Publish Date" data definition value. In this case, an asset created with a "Publish Date" of 12/16/2011 would be automatically placed in the /news/2011/12 directory, if such a directory exists.
We encourage Cascade developers to visit this new repository often for additional example projects and updates to existing projects, and as always, we welcome contributions from our innovative and resourceful user community.
Additional Considerations
Finally, there are a few tips to keep in mind when developing and using custom plug-ins:
- Maintain a back up of all custom plug-in JAR files. After installation of new Cascade Server versions, all custom plug-in JAR files will need to be re-added to the [CASCADE-HOME]/tomcat/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/lib directory.
- For major version releases, it may be necessary to recompile your plug-in project with the most current Cascade and Asset Factory API jars.
- In all cases, it is recommended to install upgrades on a test instance first and verify that all custom plug-ins continue to function as intended.
Related Content
Category
- Resources
- Resources
Back By Popular Demand - Cascade Server Group Training
By Uran Piedra
Monday, January 24th, 2011 at 11:20am
In November of last year, we hosted our first-ever online cross-client group training. This training option was designed for client institutions that may only have one or two people at their organization who need to be trained, and therefore don’t necessarily need our standard dedicated training. All seats were filled, and we’ve received nothing but positive feedback from those in attendance. After hearing from several other clients that they would like the opportunity to attend a group training, we’ve decided to hold another one.
Date and Time
The training will take place on 2/22/2011 and 2/23/2011. The 12-hour group training will be held over the course of two days. In order to accommodate clients in each time zone, the sessions will take place from 10 AM to 1 PM EST and 2 PM to 5 PM EST, with a one hour break on each day.
Format
The training will be held online, via a screen-sharing session, and a conference number will be provided. Since we are restricting the maximum number of participants to ten, you will have plenty of opportunity to directly interact with the trainer. You will also be given access to our training instance in case you would like to follow along with the examples. Of course, feel free to work on your own instance if you prefer.
Topics Covered
Most of the topics covered in our standard two-day session will also be covered in the group training including Cascade Server Technical Basics, Creating Sites, Configuration Sets and Content Types, Metadata and Structured Data, Formats, Advanced Velocity, and Publishing. Check out the schedule from our last group training for a more detailed version of what will be covered.
Class Size
In order to ensure the best possible interaction with the trainer, the number of participants is limited to ten.
Pricing
The price is $800 per seat and includes both days of the training.
The deadline to sign up is February 15th and spots are limited, so make sure to sign up via our training request form or by contacting Services Manager Penny Harding at 678-904-6900 x255.
Category
- News
Cascade 6.8 Beta Product Survey
By Bradley Wagner
Friday, January 21st, 2011 at 1:00pm
As many of you probably know, we released Cascade 6.8 into beta last December. We’re really excited about all of the awesome new features including a Google Analytics Connector, a native image editor, page rendering metrics, per-Site publish queues and multi-job publishing, and my personal favorite, a context menu for asset links -- a browser agnostic equivalent to the Firefox Extension. And the list goes on! Check out the release notes to learn more. As we get closer to a final release, we’re particularly interested in how you would use a few of these features at your organization. We’ve prepared a quick product survey below that we’d really appreciate you taking.
Submitting Feedback
If you have feedback on functionality not covered in the product survey below, please visit our 6.8 beta feedback forum and discuss it with us there.
Getting Access
We’ve had lots of people downloading the beta and people poking around in our hosted sandbox thus far. Please visit our website to request access to the sandbox or use your previous credentials if you’ve done sandbox testing before.
And finally, we’ve made nightly builds available for testing the absolute latest 6.8 beta changes for those of you that like to live on the bleeding edge.
Category
- News
The College Of William & Mary's Take On Cascade Server
By Chris Armistead
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 at 1:00pm
Since becoming a Hannon Hill customer nearly three years ago, Cascade Server has been the WCMS used by The College of William & Mary to manage its website content. The institution was able to centralize its web efforts and deploy Cascade to hundreds of users, and their process even became the subject of a Hannon Hill case study. During this same year, W&M also underwent a site redesign that eventually garnered them several design awards.
When it comes to their reasons for selecting Cascade Server, you don't have to take our word for it though. William & Mary's Creative Services team recently posted this blog that gives an honest take on what Cascade Server is and what it isn't. In addition, they posted this follow-up blog on how they handled the implementation process. We hope you will take a few minutes read this information coming straight from the mouths of a customer. Please visit this page for more information about W&M's site. You can also check out W&M employee Andrew Bauserman's presentation on Creative Content Consumption from the 2010 Hannon Hill User Conference.
Category
- News
Hannon Hill Client Auburn University Wins National Title
By Uran Piedra
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 at 12:30pm
Last night Auburn University took the national title in a 22-19 win over Oregon. This is the first title for Auburn since 1957 and its first BCS Championship, and we would like to congratulate the school on this huge win!
Just last week we had the opportunity to profile this Cascade Server client in a case study focusing on their CMS selection process. Having evaluated 950 total CMS systems, the web team at AU diligently worked to find a CMS that met all their needs and finally decided on Cascade Server. Read our case study to see what challenges Auburn faced with their previous CMS and what criteria they used to narrow down the candidates. Congratulations again, Auburn. WAR EAGLE!
Category
- News