There were multiple issues with College of the Canyons’ current website: the features and capabilities stakeholders needed simply weren't there. Stephen explains:
"Flexibility with permissioning was a big issue for us. Without the ability to parse out duties, more issues fell to me. The other major issue was control within components added to pages in a flexible way. We had the ability, but they could be easily broken."
Stephen Burns, Web Developer, College of the Canyons
The old CMS took a lot of work to maintain. Stephen recalls:
"At least half of my time per week was devoted to fixing issues Content Managers needed help with, such as copying and removing pages, or fixing a “translated table” component, which were tables that converted into HTML at publish via XML/XSL."
Stephen Burns, Web Developer, College of the Canyons
In addition to all of this, a five-year contract was up for renewal. With one developer responsible for multiple web properties, the team needed a flexible, easy-to-use platform that could scale governance.
"Our current CMS had become stagnant, and a lot of the features people wanted weren’t there. So we did our due diligence and picked Hannon Hill." Stephen Burns, Web Developer, College of the Canyons
Cascade CMS is flexible and easy to use
The committee rated a total of 4 CMS options and gravitated toward Cascade CMS for its extensibility, form-based authoring, and overall usability.
Our tools are built for web developers to move with speed
Cascade’s support for Velocity and HTML/PHP languages, combined with a cleaner backend, made spinning up sites faster than before.
Responsive partnership from the jump
From implementation through year one, Hannon Hill’s support and training were consistently fast and helpful.
Cascade is a blank slate CMS that doesn’t force anything on you. That could be nerve-wracking for some, but for me, it gave me the power to implement what we needed.”
Stephen Burns, Web Developer, College of the Canyons
Cascade’s migration tool scraped the existing site and populated new templates and assets. College of the Canyons’ developer was free to focus on testing, building, and standing up permissions for hundreds of users across six sites.
Granular permissions, opinionated templates, and a form-based editor made it easy for casual contributors to update content without breaking layouts. This was a big change from the previous system, which was XML/XSL-based, which made it “more complex to spin up websites because of all the intricacies of the system,” Stephen says.
"We were self-hosted, and that was not an outstanding experience for us. Most content was entered through a WYSIWYG editor along with "snippets" or table-translations and “components,” which were form-based, but they took you out of the editor to add the content, and they were not nearly as extensible as building out components inside Cascade."
Stephen Burns, Web Developer, College of the Canyons
Editors and admins have benefited from practical controls and visibility. Now they can unpublish to take a page down safely, and use AI-powered metadata to generate SEO-ready tags with a click. Rollback and versioning mean a quick recovery if needed.
"We didn’t even have simple features like ‘unpublish’ before. Now content creators can see how assets are linked and turn on AI to spin up metadata really easily."
Stephen Burns, Web Developer, College of the Canyons
Accessibility enforcement
Every component now has required vs. optional fields, so accessibility is built in and enforced across the site.
Granular permissions
Unlike the old system, Cascade allows highly specific permissions that cater to roles and simplify controls across content areas. This gives contributors freedom within project limits.
Safe, confident editing
Contributors can no longer “break things” like they did in the old site. The form-based system makes it simple for casual users while protecting layouts and accessibility.
Faster delivery
With a cleaner backend and Velocity, new sites spin up faster, even with multiple web properties.
"It’s made my life easier. If one person can pull in as many sites as we have in two months, that’s amazing. It’s been very empowering."
Stephen Burns, Web Developer, College of the Canyons
Cascade CMS helps institutions enable content creators, enforce policy, and build exactly what your institution needs.
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