Cascade CMS 8.2

This release introduces a brand new look and feel for the Dashboard, the ability to automatically publish content at its Start Date, and various improvements to the process of creating, choosing, saving and publishing content.

  View Requirements

Dashboard

We've completely redesigned the dashboard to give it a fresh, new look. And we've made widgets site specific so you can compose widgets that gather information from multiple sites.

Cascade CMS 8 Dashboard

The look and feel of the individual widgets have been re-worked to make the information clear and concise. Here's the new Tasks widget for example that shows you your upcoming tasks and gives you quick access to create ones:

Tasks Widget

We've also added user profile pictures that appear -- among other places -- on the Dashboard to warmly greet you on log-in.

Publish at Start Date

The Start Date field has new meaning in Cascade CMS 8.2! Assets with a future Start Date:

Start Date Field

will be automatically published at that start date if the Publish at Start Date option in the Configure pane is enabled.

Auto-populating Image Descriptions and TinyMCE 4 update

When inserting an image into content, the Image Description (or "alt" attribute more specifically) is being automatically populated with the file's Title or Display Name.

We've also updated the core editor that ships with Cascade CMS to TinyMCE 4.5.1. This release includes a number of fixes/improvements including the ability to toggle the insert link dialog with cmd/ctrl+K hot key and a fix that again allows you to highlight/select and hyperlink text.

Gallery View

Users can now browse folder contents in a gallery view. This view uses thumbnails for images to allow users to easily distinguish and identify them when selecting them via the file chooser:

gallery view in file chooser

 or when selecting one or more assets to take actions with:

Gallery View in Folder Contents

User Profile Pictures

Users can now add pictures to their profiles. Pictures are an easy way to help users identify other users when glancing at a conversation thread, for example.

 comment thread with profile pics

Draft and Publish reminders

When saving Drafts, users are now given more prominent reminders that they're looking at Draft content.  Likewise, it is now more obvious that an asset is currently in workflow.

draft labeling

 

Additionally, a select number of notifications will now contain helpful links to next steps after completing certain actions in the system.

publish reminder

Improvements

  • Help text is now more readable
  • Context menu can now be accessed on chooser buttons using right click

Bug Fixes

  • Error when viewing a data definition block with hidden groups
  • Notifications screen does not show all notifications on first load
  • Links to 'read' notifications links do not work as expected
  • User can attempt to start a new workflow on an asset already in a workflow
  • Deleting the last comment in a comment thread makes it impossible to reply to the comment thread
  • Publishing all relationships on an asset causes future publishes using the bulk publish tool (on the Folder view screen, for example) to publish all relationships on the previous asset instead of the currently selected assets
  • "Settings" link in mobile "hamburger" menu does nothing
  • Assets can be unintentionally copied twice by quickly clicking the Copy button on the Copy modal
  • In certain scenarios, data definition block renderings get cached with invalid data if they contain index block renderings
  • Renaming or moving an asset through workflow does not work
  • Publishing assets in bulk (like from the Folder view screen) can actually unpublish the assets if assets have been unpublished using the bulk unpublish tool recently
  • Comments on tasks are no longer displayed when viewing a task

First Time Installation?

Be sure to import our default database schema prior to installing Cascade CMS for the first time. Then follow our standard installation instructions.

Upgrade Steps

  1. Shut down your currently running Cascade CMS instance.
  2. Before you upgrade, we strongly recommend that you back-up your production database. as well as set up a test instance and perform a trial run of the upgrade. All customers are entitled to a test license for this purpose.
  3. Read the release notes and upgrade guides for all releases between your version and the latest version.
  4. Cascade CMS 8 requires a full installation.
  5. Certain versions require that specific steps be taken during the upgrade process. Be sure to read over any and all items that apply to the version to which you are upgrading:

Cascade CMS 8 will not run if any content or site management components still exist in the Global area. Please review the prepration guide.

Cascade CMS 8 will not run in any other version of Tomcat except Tomcat 8 at this time. For this reason, use of the full installer during upgrade is required. ROOT.war upgrades are not supported.

As of this release, Java 8u40 or later is now required to run Cascade. The OS X, Linux, and Windows packages all ship with Java 8 JREs included for easy execution. If you're using the ZIP installer or the ROOT.war, you'll need to ensure you're pointing the application to a Java 8 JRE. See this page for instructions on updating Cascade to point to a JRE.

Organizations that use the ROOT.war upgrade method and are using SQL Server or Oracle are required to upgrade their drivers using the steps below:

    SQL Server Users
  • Download jtds-1.3.1.jar from the jTDS web site
  • Replace the file tomcat/lib/jtds-1.2.5.jar with the jtds-1.3.1.jar file
    Oracle Users
  • Download ojdbc7_g.jar from the Oracle web site
  • Replace the file tomcat/lib/ojdbc14_g.jar with the ojdbc7_g.jar file

7.12.5 and later do not support SQL Server 2005. This version of Cascade will no longer start against SQL Server 2005. Please upgrade to a supported version

All other versions of SQL Server must be running above compatibility level 80. To view and/or change the current compatibility level of your database, follow the instructions in this article: SQL Server: View or Change the Compatibility Level of a Database. We recommend setting the compatibility level to 100.

Organizations that use the ROOT.war upgrade method and are upgrading to 7.12.3 or later must follow these steps:

  • If running in a load balanced environment, check to see if the file tomcat/conf/ehcache.xml exists on each node. If this file exists, please contact support [at] hannonhill.com prior to performing the upgrade. If the file does not exist, proceed with the upgrade as usual.
  • If not running in a load balanced environment, remove the file tomcat/conf/ehcache.xml prior to performing the upgrade.

Organizations that use the ROOT.war upgrade method and are upgrading from 7.12.1 or earlier to 7.12.2 or later and use MySQL 5.6 must manually update the driver library in tomcat/lib folder from mysql-connector-java-5.1.18-bin.jar to mysql-connector-java-5.1.31-bin.jar. The file mysql-connector-java-5.1.31-bin.jar can be obtained by downloading ZIP version of Cascade CMS.

Organizations that use the ROOT.war upgrade method and are upgrading from 7.10.1 or earlier to 7.10.2 or later must remove the ehcache-core-*.jar and slf4j-api-*.jar from the ${CATALINA_BASE}/lib of Tomcat.

Organizations upgrading to 7.8.2 or above for the first time may notice a delay during the initial startup accompanied by messages like these in the log file:


2014-01-01 11:53:25,405 INFO  [OptimizeDatabaseServiceImpl] Clearing orphaned assets...
2014-01-01 11:53:25,405 INFO  [OptimizeDatabaseServiceImpl] Clearing orphaned Data Definition nodes...
2014-01-01 11:54:09,508 INFO  [OptimizeDatabaseServiceImpl] Deleted 7 orhpaned Data Definition nodes
2014-01-01 11:54:09,508 INFO  [OptimizeDatabaseServiceImpl] Repeating the operation until there are no more orhaned nodes to delete
2014-01-01 11:54:57,350 INFO  [OptimizeDatabaseServiceImpl] Deleted 14 more orhpaned Data Definition nodes
2014-01-01 12:02:30,529 INFO  [OptimizeDatabaseServiceImpl] Repeating the operation until there are no more orhaned nodes to delete
2014-01-01 12:02:58,724 INFO  [OptimizeDatabaseServiceImpl] Deleted 0 more orhpaned Data Definition nodes
2014-01-01 12:02:58,725 INFO  [OptimizeDatabaseServiceImpl] Finished clearing 224 orphaned Data Definition node record(s)
2014-01-01 12:02:58,725 INFO  [OptimizeDatabaseServiceImpl] Fixing Structured Data with missing owner entity property
2014-01-01 12:03:29,712 INFO  [OptimizeDatabaseServiceImpl] Found 211 broken Structured Data nodes
2014-01-01 12:03:32,451 INFO  [OptimizeDatabaseServiceImpl] Fixed a total of 9 assets with broken Structured Data nodes
It is important that the Cascade CMS process not be stopped during this time. Once the orphaned Data Definition nodes have been removed, the application will start up normally.

If you are upgrading from Cascade CMS 7.4.1 or later, you should rebuild search indexes after the upgrade is complete and the application is running. To do so, navigate to System Menu -> Utilities -> Search Indexing, check the Rebuild Index? checkbox and then click Submit.