ContentOps in Higher Ed: What We Can Learn from DevOps
DevOps revolutionized how teams build, test, and release code in software development by emphasizing speed, quality, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Do you ever wonder if and how those principles could be applied to your web content? Indeed, the concept of ContentOps has gained a lot of traction. At an elementary level, it’s a strategic approach that helps institutions, such as colleges, universities, and other organizations with a massive web presence, create and manage content efficiently, consistently, and at scale. And if you’re using Cascade CMS, you already have the foundation in place.
Here’s how institutions can adopt a DevOps-inspired model using Cascade CMS as their central hub.
Version Control
In software development, version control helps teams track changes, collaborate safely, and quickly roll back to any previous version whenever needed. Cascade CMS brings that same power to your content workflow:
- Audit trails: Every publish, edit, or deletion is logged, so you always know who did what.
- Versions and compare: Quickly compare versions of a Page or Block and restore a previous version with just a couple of clicks.
Cascade turns content edits into traceable, manageable operations.
Automation: Streamline Reviews and Reduce Bottlenecks
DevOps teams automate wherever they can. With Cascade CMS, content teams can do the same:
- Approval Workflows: Route content through custom review paths. Set up different workflows for news, events, or academic program pages. Cascade supports anything from simple one-step approval processes to highly complex decision trees.
- Scheduled publishing: Time content updates to your live site down to the minute, which is crucial, especially for time-sensitive content like admission deadlines, campaign launches, events, or announcements.
- Content expiration and notifications: Cascade can automatically expire outdated pages and archive them. In addition, you can set Review Dates for each piece of content so that your contributors get notified of upcoming or expired review dates in their Daily Content Report and on their Cascade Dashboard. In addition, the CMS has built-in Stale Content Reports, which lets you set “stale” parameters for individual sites or sections of a site and alert you to any assets that fall into the stale category and should be revisited.
Outdated, inaccurate content or content that doesn’t pass the sniff test for audience fit and on-brand messaging can significantly impact the effectiveness of your site. Cascade puts guardrails and action items in place to ensure quality content without needing a single person on the web team to become the website police.
QA and Testing
DevOps never ships code without testing. Cascade CMS supports the same mindset for content. Here’s how.
- Accessibility checkers: Cascade has an on-page accessibility checker that points users to the exact spots on the page with issues like color contrast or missing alt-text. It even provides steps for remediation and allows users to filter by different accessibility standards. The best part is that the checker happens before issues are published to the live site. In addition, Cascade provides connectors to best-of-breed tools like Siteimprove and Monsido.
- Link checker: Cascade can check for broken internal and external links as soon as a contributor submits a page and has site-wide reports. The Daily Content Report even includes a priority list for content owners, showing them the pages with the most broken links.
- Spellcheck: Cascade runs spellcheck upon submitting a page and alerts users to potential typos or misspellings. It also allows users to add words to the dictionary so that they won’t be flagged as issues again.
Continuous Improvement
DevOps thrives on iteration. Cascade makes it easier for you to improve your content with continuously:
- Content Inventory Report: Cascade provides a clear view of what content exists, what’s being used, and what needs attention, and it even allows you to take action right from the report, such as publishing, unpublishing, setting review dates, or assigning a content owner.
- Personalization with Clive: Clive allows you to provide tailored content for different segments of your audience. It also gives you the data you need to see if your strategy is working. And don’t forget its ability to A/B test different versions of images, CTAs, paragraphs, headings, etc.
- Custom Metadata: Cascade lets you track performance-related tags (e.g., “Last Reviewed,” “Author,” “Content Score”) to prioritize updates.
Cross-department Collaboration:
DevOps breaks down walls between dev and ops. ContentOps should do the same between Marketing and IT, Marketing and Admissions, Academics and Advancement, or central teams and distributed content contributors.
Here are some of how Cascade can help:
- Granular permissions: Cascade allows you to have as many custom groups and roles as you need. You can define which sites, folders, and pages a user can access and what they can do. Every type of user can have a custom interface so that you can determine who can do what down to the individual content entry field or even button.
- Content reuse & Snippets: Cascade allows you to share a single piece of content, no matter how small, across multiple pages, sites, and platforms. Since Cascade manages content in structured fields rather than one monolithic WYSIWYG editor, it’s easy to share sections and components of pages to ensure maximum portability and syndication. In addition, Cascade Snippets lets you centrally manage content placeholders for things that need consistency across your website, such as enrollment numbers, deadlines, or tuition rates.
- Structured content templates: Cascade removes the need for content contributors to make design decisions and lets them focus on what matters most: quality content. Since every type of user has a custom interface based on their role and skillset, the proper guardrails are in place to prevent users from compromising brand integrity or breaking pages altogether.
From Chaos to Coordination
ContentOps isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a mindset shift. In higher education, where content is decentralized and sprawling, it can be the key to transforming your website management.
Cascade CMS is built with these principles in mind. It gives you the tools to plan smarter, collaborate better, and deliver content your audiences can trust.
Let’s stop treating web content like one-off projects and start managing it like a strategic asset.
Want to see how Cascade CMS and Clive Web Personalization can power your ContentOps vision?
Contact us today to schedule a free demo!
Whether you’re launching a new redesign or just want to declutter, we’re here to help.
Last Updated: Dec 17, 2025 9:00 AM
