Siteimprove Integration

Overview

Cascade CMS's Siteimprove plugin allows existing Siteimprove customers to access the Siteimprove Intelligence Platform from within the CMS. It enables you and your team to identify and correct accessibility issues in your editing environment as soon as a page is published.

This plugin also makes it easier for content contributors, managers, and editors to leverage Siteimprove Analytics data to create better content more efficiently. You can use the plugin to check if unpublishing a page will have an impact on your site. For example, you'll be able to see if deleting a page will affect your SEO, or if users will lose access to important documents and links.

The plugin overlays quality assurance, analytics, and accessibility data when viewing the relevant content in Cascade CMS. Overall, the Siteimprove integration provides insights into:

• Misspellings and broken links
• Readability levels
• Accessibility issues (A, AA, AAA conformance level)
• SEO: technical, content, UX, and mobile
• Page visits and page views
• Feedback rating and comments
• The impact of unpublishing a specific page
• URL shortener data and its impact on your digital assets

Enabling the Siteimprove Integration

At the System Level

To enable the Siteimprove integration for your environment:

1. Click the system menu button (  ) > Administration > Preferences > Integrations & Plugins.
2. Under Siteimprove Settings enable the Enable Siteimprove Plugin option.
3. Optionally, enable Do not include "index" in Siteimprove URLs.
   • Select this option if the index pages for your site appear as https://www.example.com/about/ in Siteimprove as opposed to https://www.example.com/about/index.html.
4. Submit your changes.

At the Site Level

To enable the Siteimprove integration for a site:

1. Ensure the Siteimprove integration is enabled at the system level (see above).
2. Navigate to Manage Site > Site Settings.
3. Toggle the Enable Siteimprove Integration option.
4. Submit your changes.

At the Site Role Level

To enable User/Group access to the Siteimprove overlay:

1. Ensure the Siteimprove integration is enabled at the system and site levels (see above).
2. Review the Site Roles assigned to your site under Manage Site > Site Settings > Roles.
3. Edit the appropriate Site Role under Administration > Roles.
4. Toggle the Access the Siteimprove integration ability.
5. Submit your changes.

Logging into the Siteimprove Integration

If you have a user account in Siteimprove, you can log into the Siteimprove overlay with your credentials after it has been enabled. Your user role and permissions in Siteimprove will determine which sites you can see data for in the overlay.

To log in to the Siteimprove integration:

1. Navigate to an enabled site and you'll see the Siteimprove badge on the right-hand side of the interface.
2. Click Login to log in with your Siteimprove credentials.

Viewing Siteimprove Data

Page Data

To view Siteimprove data for a page, navigate to the page within Cascade CMS and open the overlay by clicking on the Siteimprove badge. You can view data for index pages either by navigating to the index page itself or its parent folder.

If you're not seeing data for your page in the overlay, ensure that:

• Your site has been imported into your Siteimprove account.
• The Site URL for your site in Cascade CMS is the same as the URL that appears in your Siteimprove inventory. If not, set the Siteimprove URL in Site Settings.
• Your page has been published.
• Your page has been crawled by Siteimprove and appears in your inventory.

Site Data

To view site-level data for your site, select the Site Overview tab in the overlay. When viewing a folder that doesn't contain an index page, site-level data will be displayed by default.

Sending Re-Check Requests to Siteimprove

Publishing a page will send a re-check request for the page to Siteimprove. You can also use the Re-check page button in the plugin to issue a manual request for Siteimprove to re-check its content without publishing.

Publishing a Folder, Site, or Destination will send a re-check request for all successfully-published pages contained in the publish job.

Configuring your Siteimprove URL

If the URL of your site in Siteimprove is different than the Site URL of your site in Cascade CMS, specify your Siteimprove URL under Manage Site > Site Settings > Siteimprove URL.

Deep Linking in Siteimprove

To make correcting issues in your content easier, Siteimprove offers "CMS Deeplinking". Deeplinking creates links to your page assets in Cascade CMS from within reports in your Siteimprove account. To do this, the Cascade CMS ID of your page assets needs to be included in the page's published source.

You can include a page's ID in your Template(s) with a simple region and Velocity format:

1. Create a Velocity Format containing the following:

   <meta name="id" content="${currentPage.identifier.id}"/>

2. Create a new region within the <head> tags of your Template(s). Example:

   <!-- Page ID for Siteimprove deep linking. -->
   <system-region name="PAGE_ID"/>

3. Attach your Format to this new region in your Template(s).
4. Publish all pages that use the Template(s) to ensure that your page ID <meta> tag gets included the pages on your web server.

Local Plugin Settings

To adjust your personal plugin settings, click the Settings icon in the bottom right corner of the plugin frame. Available settings are the included Page Content Issues, the included SEO areas, and the placement of the widget. 

Siteimprove Prepublish functionality

Siteimprove is capable of checking content before it is published. To enable this functionality:

1. In Siteimprove:
   • Ensure that your account has the Prepublish functionality enabled.
   • Locate/Create a Siteimprove API user with the "admin" or "owner" role.
   • Create API credentials for that user (Main Menu > Integrations > API).
2. In Cascade CMS:
   • In the Siteimprove Settings, check Allow for Siteimprove Prepublish checks (as seen in the image below).
   • Provide the API user credentials for the Siteimprove API user.
   • Click the Verify button to verify the Siteimprove account.
   • Click Submit.

Once the Siteimprove Prepublish functionality is verified and submitted, you can perform Prepublish checks by clicking the More menu and then selecting Siteimprove Prepublish check. This option is available not only while viewing the current version of a Page, but also for previous Versions, Drafts, and Working Copies.

After selecting Siteimprove Prepublish check, the Siteimprove frame will open and trigger the check on the currently viewed asset. Once complete, you can click the See results button (as indicated below) to view those results.