The University of Montana Cascade Blog

Cascade update: version 7.0.7

umcms — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:46:46 +0000

We will be rolling out version 7.0.7 of Cascade this evening, starting at 5:00pm. Downtime is expected to be an hour. There’s a bunch of new features, including massive speed increases which should help the slowness we have been experiencing.

New features:

Index block caching: The navigation and other ‘automatically generating’ assets in Cascade use ‘Index Blocks’ to accomplish what they need to do. Now this operation will be much quicker, meaning that pages being viewed in Cascade, publishing and other tasks should be anywhere from twice to eight times faster, depending on what Cascade has to do in the backend.
Type ahead search when linking to assets: Now when you’re trying to link to a page you can do a search for that asset without having to manually browse for it.
Asset browser is no longer a pop up window: The asset chooser window will no longer get lost behind other windows on your computer, and will work more reliably in older versions of Internet Explorer.
Unpublishing assets more easily: When moving or renaming an asset, Cascade will now ask if you want to unpublish the asset so what’s on the server isn’t out of sync with what’s in your CMS site.

There are also number of new features that are less forward facing that you can read about here: http://www.hannonhill.com/kb/Release-Notes/7.0/index.html

A note about Cascade’s recent performance

umcms — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 19:11:16 +0000

- 1/22/13 edit – Cascade performance seems to be stable.

For the past week (January 14th until January 18th) Cascade has been running very slow, and I’d like to give some background on why it is happening and let you, the users, know what we’re doing to fix the situation.

First, I apologize for the glacial pace that Cascade has been moving for the past few days. We pride ourselves with keeping the CMS running smooth and as stable as we can get it, and the last week has not lived up to the expectations that we set for ourselves.

We were attempting to get basic analytics, provided by Google Analytics, onto all the sites hosted by us (sites that publish to the umt.edu servers.) This would have allowed users to see analytical data from inside Cascade. Some sites already have this functionality, but it was limited to set of people who requested it.

Since we had a number of sites using this feature and it was working great, we started rolling it out to all sites under our jurisdiction. Once we had it all configured, Cascade began having intermittent issues with its performance. Since then, we’ve removed the analytics connectors from the sites we put then on earlier this week. It is still on our to-do list to get this data into Cascade, but not until a deployment of this scale is thoroughly tested and we are satisfied with the performance of the application.

Our current plan is to let Cascade work through what it’s trying to execute over the long weekend, and see if performance goes back to acceptable levels and then go from there.

Thanks for your continued patience.

Karl Fite
Application Support Specialist
Web Technology Services/Information Technology

Important Cascade Information

umcms — Thu, 10 May 2012 20:23:20 +0000

On the morning of Wednesday, May the 23rd, we will be going live with our new server environment. For sites that are currently publishing to our production destination (www.umt.edu/SITE_NAME), all of the content in your site(s) will be automatically published to production at this time.

Please make sure that on May the 23rd, all of your content is ready to go live.

The http://staging.umt.edu server is configured the same as our new production environment. You should publish your site to the staging destination and then take a look at your site on staging. To access your site on staging visit http://staging.umt.edu/SITE_NAME, for instance if your site is http://www.umt.edu/my_site your staging location would be http://staging.umt.edu/my_site.

If you have direct file system access to your site and have been manually placing files on the webserver (without using Cascade), please contact us at webhelp@mso.umt.edu. We are discontinuing this practice for our main webserver and on May 23^rd you will no longer have this access.

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns at webhelp@mso.umt.edu..

Cascade downtime notice

umcms — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:48:37 +0000

We will be performing a server migration for Cascade on Wednesday, May 2nd from 5:00pm until 7:00pm. Cascade will be unavailable during this time.

Firefox 11 bug

umcms — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 20:21:30 +0000

-UPDATE-

Firefox 12 fixes this issue. Please update your Firefox if it hasn’t already.

For users using Firefox 11 (newest version,) there is a bug on the edit screen where the first editor on a page with multiple editors shows no content. Do not worry, that content is still in the system, but there’s a bug with displaying it.

If this bug is affecting you, please use another web browser for the time being. Because of the widespread nature of this bug, it’s possible that Mozilla will patch Firefox to fix this bug. We’ll send out an update when this issue is resolved.

For more information on this bug, please see:

http://help.hannonhill.com/discussions/bug-reports/211-wysiwyg-editing-in-firefox-11

Cascade Update Scheduled for the morning of Saturday, January 28

umcms — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:50:39 +0000

Cascade will be updated to version 6.10.7 on Saturday, January 28th at 10:00am. Because there are significant changes to the Velocity Engine, we will have to fix most scripts in the system. Because of this, Cascade will be down longer than normal. We estimate that it will take 5 hours to fix all the scripts.

We ask that during the hours of 10:00am until 3:00pm on Saturday, January 28th users remain outside of Cascade to minimize the amount of pages that get published in a broken state. We will put an “all clear” message out on this blog when we are finished updating the scripts.

Cascade upgrade on Tuesday, April 19th

umcms — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 13:55:18 +0000

Cascade will be upgraded to version 6.8 the morning of Tuesday, April 19th. The CMS will be unavailable from 6:30am until 7:00am. This update fixes a lot of issues with the current system while also introducing new functionality. The big changes are:

Image Editing inside Cascade
Cascade now features an inline image editor that doesn’t require any software to be installed on your computer to use. The editor can resize, crop, rotate and flip images — all inside the CMS.

No more waiting in line
In previous versions of Cascade, you could get queued behind the publishing jobs of other users. In Cascade 6.8, each Site has their own publish queue. Cascade will also not allow users from duplicating publish jobs that are already in the queue.

Get around faster
Cascade now has a “Context Menu” when you hover over assets in the system. When you click the context menu icon represented by a down arrow, users can choose to edit, move/rename, etc.

Less bothersome when using Internet Explorer
When using Internet Explorer, messages about “secure and non-secure items” should no longer appear.

To see all the changes, visit Hannon Hill’s Release Notes (http://www.hannonhill.com/kb/Release-Notes/6.8/index.html )

Cascade Login Changes

umcms — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 22:57:58 +0000

On Tuesday, September 21st, we will be changing the way you will log into Cascade.

Because the current log in system does not warn users when their password expires, we are changing to a system that will improve password management for Cascade users.

You will still log in with your Netid, but the page will look different. We will be implementing the same log in mechanism that applications such as Onestop, Academic Planner and Blackboard use.

Cascade Users Group: September 14th

umcms — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 16:39:45 +0000

This is a reminder that we hold Cascade Users Groups every second Tuesday of each month at 2 o’clock in Liberal Arts 139. This month it falls on September 14th. Bring along those Cascade issues you’ve had in the back of your mind and we’ll get them into the open and hopefully help solve them.

New version of Cascade available

karlfite — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:36:08 +0000

On Tuesday, July 13th, we will be updating Cascade to version 6.7. There are significant changes to the user interface as well as many new features. Here is a sampling of the changes:

Recycle Bin: Deleting an asset in Cascade will now temporarily store the asset in a recycle bin that you may access from your Dashboard. The asset will be stored for 30 days before it gets permanently removed.
Automatic Paste from Word: Cascade will now automatically detect and clean up code for content pasted in from Word.
Unsaved changes warning: Cascade will warn you when navigating away from a page that you modified without submitting.
Interface Changes: The user interface of Cascade has been streamlined. Delete is now under “more” to quell undesired deletion, System names are now under “Move/Rename” instead of the “System” tab and you won’t need to switch tabs to put system name in when creating an asset, among other things.

We will be updating our CMS Help site on Tuesday morning to reflect the changes made in the new version. The site can be found at http://www.umt.edu/cms/

Join us on Tuesday, July 13th at 2:00 – 3:00 in Liberal Arts 139 for our first Cascade Users Group. We’ll be answering your questions, as well as going over some of the changes in the new version of Cascade.