Content Authoring - Cascade CMS Knowledge Base

Accessibility

Cascade CMS offers a variety of features to help you create and publish accessible content. Learn more about accessibility features in Cascade CMS here.

Advanced Code Editor

The Advanced Code Editor (ACE) is Cascade CMS' built-in syntax-highlighting editor.

Asset Factories allow users to rubber stamp new assets with certain configurations and content already in place. Asset Factories can be used to create assets from scratch or be based on an existing pre-configured base asset.

Create Resized Images Plug-in

This plug-in allows an administrator to specify that multiple resized images will be created when a user uploads a single image.

Data Definition Field(s) to System Name Plug-in

This plug-in takes the value from a specified structured data field, makes it "safe" by removing non-SEO characters, and turns that into the system name for the new asset.

Display to System Name Plug-in

This plug-in ensures that newly-created assets are given search engine friendly system names.

Image Resizer Plug-in

This plug-in allows an administrator to specify that an uploaded image be resized to particular dimensions.

Friendly Page Name Plug-in

This plugin limits the system name of new page assets to configurable regular expression.

Set Start Date Plug-in

This plug-in sets the metadata field "start date" to the current time for newly created assets, with an optional configurable offset.

Title to System Name Plug-in

This plug-in ensures that newly-created assets are given search engine friendly system names.

Asset Factory Plugins

An overview of available plugins for use as part of Asset Factories.

File Limit Plug-in

This plug-in allows administrators to place restrictions on the size and type of file created using a specific asset factory.

Blocks

A block is a piece of content that can be inserted (with or without styling) into any page region.

XML Blocks

XML Blocks are reusable pieces of content stored as well-formed, static XML or XHTML. These blocks are particularly useful when there is content/data which must be included on one or more pages of a website.

Index Blocks

An index block is a special type of block that returns a listing of assets from the CMS directory structure in the form of XML data.

XHTML/Data Definition Blocks

An XHTML/Data Definition block is a reusable block of content that provides a rich word processing (WYSIWYG) interface or Data Definition form fields for editing content.

Feed Blocks

XML feed blocks pull their XML content from a web location. This can be useful when aggregating outside RSS links or receiving output from dynamic scripts or web applications that produce XML.

Text Blocks

Text blocks are basic blocks of content that can be reused throughout a site much like an XHTML block. Text blocks are not as widely used as their XHTML counterpart is, because text blocks lack the standard WYSIWYG editor contained inside of XHTML blocks that allow for the creation of rich content with images, links, and standard text formatting options.

External Links

An external link is an asset that points to a website hosted outside of Cascade CMS.

Files

Files are content typically created by external programs and imported for use in Cascade CMS.

Folders

You can use folders and subfolders to contain and organize your Site Content assets.

Pages

Page assets represent the combination of Template, content, scripts, and/or Formats to produce one or more rendered outputs for publishing.

Rendering Metrics

Rendering metrics is a tool used to evaluate rendering times of page. You can see how long it takes for each region in a page to render and can then adjust blocks and formats applied to slow regions to improve rendering times.

Editable Fields

System Tags

Cascade CMS recognizes specific XML elements called system tags that are used for dynamic content insertion.

Publishing

Cascade CMS features a robust publishing engine designed to render and publish content to one or more environments. Once content is published, it's completely decoupled from the CMS, allowing it to operate independently in any standard environment.

Relationships

Publish Sets

A publish set is a group of publishable assets that can be published either on-demand or on a schedule. They may contain files, folders, and/or pages.

Transports

A Transport represents a server to which content can be published.

Destinations

Destinations define the link between site content and the location to which site content can be published.

Publishing Related Content

Often times, assets you're working on will affect other content in your site. Cascade CMS offers multiple ways to publish related content.

WYSIWYG Editor Configurations

WYSIWYG Editor Configurations allow you to customize which features of the WYSIWYG rich-text editor are available to content creators.

WYSIWYG Editor Configuration Upgrade Guide

This guide covers the technical details that you should experience after upgrading your system to support Editor Configurations and some recommendations to help make the migration as seamless as possible for end user experience.

Asset Naming Rules

Asset naming rules allow you to enforce a consistent format for system names in Cascade CMS.

Code Sections

Cascade CMS currently supports the use of two types of code sections in the system: Passthrough code sections and protect code sections.

Content Checks

Users can check new or revised assets for spelling errors, invalid internal or external links, and accessibility issues with Cascade CMS's built-in content checks.

Content Tips

Linking

Cascade CMS provides a number of different ways to manage links in content depending on the type of asset containing the link, the type of link (internal or external), and the location of both assets.

References

A reference is a special asset in Cascade CMS that represents an existing asset in another location; thus, a single asset can appear to exist in multiple locations. While a single asset appears in navigation as if it were in multiple locations, in actuality, it directs back to the original asset.

System Pseudo-Tags

System pseudo-tags are special system tags that instruct Cascade CMS to act on the content contained within them.

Versions

Cascade CMS maintains a version history Site Content and Manage Site assets in the system. As changes are made to assets, Cascade CMS keeps track of the changes in separate copies of the asset called versions.