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Fueling Powerful Digital Experiences
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I love the push based publishing of Cascade CMS. This allows our website to have virtually 24/7 365 operation since there is no database dependency for basic operation.
There are no significant items I am dissatisfied with.
This is a great product supported by a great organization in Hannon Hill that cares for and listens to its customers.
We use Cascade to manage our entire enterprise website with over 400+ publishers and 300+ sub-sites.
Very customizable and powerful once you learn and understand the underlying data structures. Comprehensive REST API that allows for interaction with the CMS using whatever method you typically would.
They're always adding new features, and actively soliciting feedback about how to make it better.
Setting stuff up takes a lot of technical knowhow, which could be a problem for non-technical administrators. Because it's so flexible, it can sometimes be difficult to decide what direction is best.
It helps manage the website and distribute our updating to various departments on campus who know their content best. Helps us have one central place where all our content is located, so there's never a question as to how pages get updated.
Cascade is, very nearly, infinitely customizable. It uses either XML or Velocity to build the backend for creating and updating content. The outputs are extraordinarily flexible. We moved from an HTML front end to leveraging a design system in order to enhance the webteam's ability to build services that are easily branded to a particular school or department within the University.
The one thing that can be challenging is the speed of Cascade. The more complicated you design your page, the longer it takes for cascade to load the page for display, and edit.
We were lucky in that we had a webteam member who was already familiar with Cascade when we brought it in. I highly recommend that you purchase the consulting time to have Hannon Hill come in and help you to configure and set it up.
We are resolving a number of problems. The biggest was content ownership, which cascade has a great setup for. The next was giving our maintainers more flexibility in the templates they can use. We were able to implement a "build your own" template that allows people to design, practically, any type of page they want.
One of the benefits of using Cascade is the ability to utilize work flows. This allows for a technical review as well as a content review. Technical review would be examining things like page structure, layout and image sizes. Content review is exactly what it sounds like, an opportunity for another set of eyes to catch any issues with the content, or to improve it.
I like how primary the interface is and the clear delineation of hierarchy.
The dashboard is overwhelming, and I find that the specific pages I use do not appear as recent, so I always have to drill down.
The library did not have access to the website, so when I was trained on Cascade CMS, I was able to make quick changes without relying on an external source.
You can preview how a project looks in development before pushing live. This means you can get other opinions along the way. I also like that it has version history so that you can revert back to a previous version easily and quickly. The file system set-up is well done. You are able to keep projects together by folders, with images, documents, pages all collected within the folder. This allows you to produce essentially small websites of category within your main website.
If templates are set at a main level, it's harder to add changes to a page without using a lot of CSS. It would be nice if conditions were added within modules to better tweak results. It's like a WordPress page builder without full functionality. If modules are built into the templates, moving them about on the page really isn't an option; though you can move info within each module. This means that the design needs to be thought out much more. Another dislike is that the view while writing may not actually be what it looks like. Any rss feeds, event feeds, etc. won't populate until it's published - dev or live.
Decide how much flexibility you want with a CMS. I tend to like WordPress for its ease and overall design. Cascade is great for revisions and file structure.
It's easy to have many people work on a site and manage what areas, down to the page, that they have access to at any point. You can also include subsites and restrict based on a hierarchy within the company or business.
The most helpful feature of Cascade CMS is its flexibility. You are not locked in to a particular UI or UX - it becomes what you make of it. The CMS editing interface is yours to describe and build, the data architecture is yours to manipulate. If you can imagine it, you can build it with Cascade, with whatever your preferred server- and client-side language(s) are.
The downside to Cascade is the amount of resources needed for a fast implementation. It is resource-hungry, and if your websites get too large, you will definitely notice some speed and efficiency hits to your self-hosted solution. As long as you are willing to invest in hardware upgrades in the long term, Cascade is a great product.
Cascade CMS is a great choice for enterprise-level content management. You will need to use their implementation of Velocity templating language, and be familiar with XML and structured content markup. But once you get the hang of it it is a powerful solution and almost infinitely flexible. .NET and PHP are both well-suited for use within Cascade depending on preference. We even have some old ColdFusion running in there.
The problem we were solving was using a reliable, flexible, extensible, platform-agnostic CMS to power our higher ed web sites. While other universities have moved to a Wordpress model, we wanted something more robust without 3rd party dependencies. Cascade has a nice user interface for our casual users as well.
Cascade CMS make no assumptions about your content.
Without previous experience, professional training and implementation assistance is required.
We needed a custom user interface for specialized content layout and publication workflows.
It's a well-organized platform that's easy to use and train people on/in.
Brush up on your Velocity. The building blocks necessary to build out an experience presents somewhat of a learning curve.
We use it to manage our flagship website and supporting, smaller sites such as calendars, directories, intranet, etc.
I like that I can edit and produce sites intensively without implementing the changes until they're fully ready to go. I also like the robust use of templates and premade materials that make it easy for me to work with materials supplied by IT.
I dislike how much clicking is required to publish a change. The submit option is great when making big updates, but when making small changes to many pages on a site, it takes forever.
I administer an informational site in education—we give visitors details about courses and instructors. Cascade has benefitted my work in allowing me to work with templates that the university uses. It solves the problem of not being able to see how your changes will look because the interface is so clean.
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I like how Cascade centralizes content in XML and opens up transformation via XSLT or Velocity Script. I like the power offered via Velocity Script since there are Java standard methods and multiple built-in tools. I like also having capability of building tools in the CMS, including jQuery-based web service calls using the REST API.
I dislike how the system handles ampersands. It always demands they precede an entity and this causes errors in the system. I dislike the inefficient search capability, particularly when choosing an asset though this is reportedly being changed in a soon-to-be-released upgrade.
This will make centralization, maintenance, migrations and changes so much easier with your web presence.
Centralization branding, code and web presence. There has been improved efficiency with maintenance, migrations and development. It is also more secure as assets can be locked down. This protects the template and more complex coding while allowing web publishers and content managers from various departments to better maintain the content on their departmental sites. This CMS also allows a centralized backup of our assets used on the website.