Best Practices for Cross-Site Sharing

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012 at 11:00am -- Rahul BhagnariBookmark and Share


So You’re Moving To Sites? Best Practices when Cross-Site Sharing

Cascade Server 6.0 introduced a revolutionary game changer into the content management system: Sites. A unique and efficient way of segmenting, categorizing, and structuring your website. A Site in Cascade Server works as an entity unto itself – complete with its own folder structure and administrative assets. We’re talking wholly unique, completely separated and distinct areas. Mind. Blown. Think of the possibilities at play here – you can have distinct organizations all updating their own sites at the same time within the same system all pushing their pages out to the same server. It’s harmony – it’s like The Police wrote and performed Synchronicity III.

But alas – all is not well – sometimes departments can’t be trusted to have tastefully appropriate web pages. Sometimes, they want a professional page to look like a 14 y/o girl’s Tumblr dashboard. Well, we for the sake of humanity, for the sake of standardization, we just can’t let that happen. So how do we set up someone with their own Site, so that they’re completely insulated and responsible for their own content, without making them responsible for the design or layout? Why cross-site asset sharing and linking of course (like you couldn’t tell from the title of this post)!

So – how does it work? Well I’m glad you asked. I’ve included some useful tidbits of information to help you get started and get going on setting up your cross-site asset sharing experience. This is a useful blog post! Huzzah!

  • Set up a _common Site. At the end of the day, the majority of your pages are going to look the same – or at the very least – you’re going to want them to look the same. Further, you would also want to keep your administrative files – your CSS, JavaScript, rich media content files – out of the way of some of your users. You know the ones. The ones who delete your folder of images. Setting up a common site provides you with an easy to use area to house all of these assets as opposed to the Global area.
  • Keep your images together. It sounds odd – maybe you don’t want one of your departments putting up their office Christmas party pictures online. But look at it from the other side – those developers look pretty awesome as Santa’s tipsy elves. Keeping a central repository of images prevents duplicates of random background images and also promotes sharing across departments. Aww!
  • Keep your page types within each Site. While each of your page types can essentially use the same metadata set, configuration set, and data definition – if you have a copy of these page types on each Site, you can then tie those outputs to your destinations (which are Site-specific). This comes in handy for mobile sites or outputting different layouts of pages to different areas.
  • Rewrite your links. The best part about Cascade Server is that it keeps track of all the assets in your system. Every asset has its own ID – file, page, block – it doesn’t matter. So why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of this functionality? When uploading a file to Cascade, you have the option to “Rewrite Links in File” – this essentially will rewrite an image or page link to point directly to that asset. So, should you ever move the image or set up a new Site for all of your common elements, your files will always be pointing to the proper location. Nothing goes missing! Ever!
  • Use the Site name. When cross-site sharing, many users will forget to mention the Site when writing out a path name in their formats or CSS files or templates. Don’t forget this! How is anyone supposed to know what Site these files are coming from? Cascade Server isn’t Hogwarts. This also comes in handy when pulling out node information from your assets. For example, did you know that an asset path will give you the relative path information (specific to that Site) while an asset link will give you the full path? Fascinating, right?

There are lots of different ways to implement a cross-site sharing platform. I’ve provided some general Best Practices cases but for the most part, you can set up the assets in a way that makes the most sense for you. If you don’t want to share images, then you don’t have to. If you do want people to have access to CSS files, then go ahead. The beauty of Cascade Server is that is provides you with several options without explicitly limiting you to any one of these. So give it a shot.

Lastly, check out some of our Knowledge Base articles for more information:


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