Why are my changes not appearing on the web site?

If you're seeing discrepancies between your asset in Cascade CMS and on your live website, see the steps below for possible resolutions.

Verify that you've submitted the job for publishing

After creating or editing an existing asset in Cascade CMS, you must publish your asset in order to see your changes on the live website.

Your organization may have the system configured to send you through a Workflow may automatically publish your changes. If it does not; however, you will need to publish the asset to one or more Destinations manually.

If you don't see the Publish option screen while viewing your asset:

  • You may be viewing a Draft of your asset, in which case you'll first need to Submit your changes)
  • Your Site Role may not allow for you to publish assets, in which case you'll need to contact your Cascade CMS administrator for assistance.
  • You may be viewing an asset that is not publishable, such as a Block, in which case you'll need to publish assets that are including the asset. For starters, you could check out this article.

Verify that the job has been processed

The next step in determining what might be happening with a publish job is to see if it has been processed. When publishing an asset (or assets), the job is sent to the Publish Queue prior to being physically transferred to your web server(s). Your Site Role will determine if you can view the Publish Queue.

If your publish job is still in the queue behind other assets waiting to be published, you'll need to wait for those jobs to be processed before your changes will appear on the web server.

If you do not have the ability to view the queue, you will need to contact your Cascade CMS administrator to have them check the queue for you or to give you the ability to view the queue yourself.

If you don't see your publish job in the Publish Queue, there is a chance it may have been processed already. In the event that a publish job has been processed, it will trigger a publish message that will be sent to your Notifications, at which point, you can see if it resulted in any errors.

Check your publish Notifications

Once your publish completes, you will receive a Notification containing more information regarding the status of that job. You can view your Notifications by following the steps outlined on this page.

Clicking on the Notification will show you more details including the number of successful jobs, errors, and skipped jobs pertaining to your publish. You'll also be able to see to which Destinations (web servers) your publish job was transmitted.

If you've received a publish message showing that there were no successful jobs and no errors...

Verify that your page has publishable Outputs

While previewing your page, click Details > Design > Content Type to view the page's Content Type.

Under Publish Options, ensure that your page Outputs are publishable, and that they are publishable to Destinations in the current site or "All Destinations".

If you've received a publish message showing that your job was successful, but still don't see the changes on your website...

Verify that you've published to the correct Destination (web server).

The publish message you received in your Notifications will outline to which Destination(s) your files and/or pages were published. Under Successful Jobs, you'll see the Destination listed first for each item that was published. For example:

[Destination: My Web Server] Main Website: files/images/banner.png

If you don't see the Destination listed to which you intended to publish, you'll want to try publishing your asset(s) once again and be sure to select the proper Destination(s). If you don't see the Destination available when you click to publish it, you may not have access to it. In this case, you'll need to contact your Cascade CMS administrator to have them include you in one of the Applicable Groups for that Destination.

Clear your browser cache and/or try a different browser.

Occasionally, your browser will load a cached version of the page or file that you're attempting to access on your web server(s). To verify whether or not this may be the case, try clearing your browser cache or use a different browser (one you don't normally use) to see if the problem persists.

If you've received a successful publish message, cleared your browser cache, tried a different browser, but still don't see the changes on your website...

Check the timestamp of the file on the web server's file system.

Unless you happen to have direct access to the web server, this step will require that you contact your web server administrator for assistance. The goal here is to see if the timestamp (last modified date) of the file in question matches the approximate time when you attempted to publish from Cascade CMS.

If the timestamp of the file in question does not match the approximate time of the publish window, the file is either never reaching this web server or it is ending up in a location that you're not expecting (in which case a search of the file system for the name of the file you're publishing may point you to the location of the published file).

Verify that your Transport/Destination are publishing to the proper location on your web server.

Depending on your role, this step may require that you contact your Cascade CMS administrator as well as your web server administrator for assistance.

See this article for information on how Transports/Destinations work in conjunction with one another to publish to a particular location on your web server.

Find out if your web server is caching.

Some web servers are configured to cache files. You'll need to reach out to your web server administrator to see if the web server in question has this setting enabled. In the event that it does, you may notice that the changes eventually show up (after a particular interval of time). Your web server may also have an option to bypass the server cache by appending certain characters to the target URL (e.g. ?resetcache=1), but your web server administrator should be able to confirm the proper parameters for your organization.

If you're still having trouble...

In the event that you're still having trouble or you're seeing an error message somewhere that you need assistance with, reach out to our support team here and we'll be happy to help troubleshoot further!