Documentation & Policies
Resources
For Partnering Developers
If your office or unit staffs web developers, your use of the WCMS will fit under the use of service model Web Communications uses. In order to facilitate easier management of the system, several guidelines have been set up for how development team autonomy is best served while preserving ease of management for University Relations. The information below describes how your team will be loaded into the system.
Clients of Web Communications should seek information in the general FAQ posted on the WCMS main site. You are a client of Web Communications if you have initiated a project with us and have been served a project proposal. In this instance, you are likely editing a single site and should seek help and information through our support personnel.
General Policies
Versions
Cascade maintains previous versions of all home area assets. The maximum number of versions kept for each asset is 90. Should we choose to lower this limit in the future, we will notify the wcms-developers listserv in advance of doing so.
File Uploads
File upload asset factories are available for every site. The current global maximum file size allowed for these is 50,000KB, or 48.8MB. This limit is established to provide adequate space for some embeddable videos, audio files, and images, with allowance for reasonable presentation files in PDF and PowerPoint formats. Files larger than this should be stored outside of Cascade, either on a file sharing web service or your web server's hard disk. You can then link to these files using the external link mechanism provided.
Publishing
Cascade Server uses a parallel publishing queue. Each site is permitted to publish two assets (including folders) at once. There are presently no guidelines on the frequency or size of publish jobs, including scheduled publish jobs, however, we strongly recommend a minimum of interval of 15 or 30 minutes for pages that use Feed blocks and require frequent updates. For full site publish jobs we still recommend one evening job every 24 hours to maintain a consistent expectation for contributors.
Publishing occurs on any one of the clustered application servers. You should open firewalls to allow traffic from the following hosts:
Prod - evanston
129.105.119.91
Prod - chicago
165.124.66.26
Test - evanston
129.105.119.185
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- Provision the user (if necessary) to create their user account in Cascade Server
- Add the user to all of the 32 character control groups that correspond to the sites in your department.
- Provision the user (if necessary) to create their user account in Cascade Server.
- Add the user to the 32 character sitegroup for the site. To find the sitegroup name, go into the Site Manager and read the "id" from the querystring/location bar -- enter the site manager (upper left menu, next to "Home") and edit the site you wish to add the user to.
This user will have full delegated control over the sites to which they have membership in a 32 character control group. This is distinct from the "developer" model (next), which permits access to site administrative objects like templates, but does not permit them to add new groups or edit site-specific settings.
- Provision the user (if necessary) to create their user account in Cascade Server.
- Add the user to a group, preferably a SITEGROUP, e.g. DEPT-NEWSITE-Developers, which belongs to a Site Role for DEPT-NEWSITE.
- Enter the site manager (upper left menu, next to "Home") and edit the site you wish to add the user to.
- If the desired Site Role is not already applied to the site (it is in the left pane), move it to the right.
- Add the applicable user group (DEPT-NEWSITE-Developers) to the right-pane for the role you wish them to have when they open this site.
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Site, User, and Group provisioning
Your Department/Unit/Group
Every group of partnering developers is assigned to a department/unit/group name. It will be referred to through the course of this document as DEPTPREFIX.
For example, if the Center for Advanced Cement Based Materials were a partnering group, their DEPTPREFIX would likely be something like CACBM.
Sites
Your department/unit starts out with one site: DEPTPREFIX-MAIN. Within it is an external link asset called xSite Manager. It will load up a suite of utilities that Web Communications has created to ease distributed management of this system. We will refer to the Site Manager several times throughout this document.
Site Creation
Creating sites is handled through the Site Manager. Do not rename your sites from the default naming scheme—it assists us in supporting your area if the naming convention is unchanged. Your sites will follow the naming convention:
(DEPTPREFIX-SITENAME)
To create a site, simply enter a name for the site in the input box and click create. The system will then create a Site in Cascade for you per the naming convention, create a new "control group" (see below) for the site, and forward you to the internal Cascade Server site settings page. We have made no assumptions about your access levels whatsoever—configuring the site is entirely up to you. Before you are able to use the site at all, you must enter the edit screen and associate your account with a site role (see the next topic). After you have associated yourself with a site role for your newly created site, you will be able to open the site using the drop-down selector.
Site Roles
Web Communications recommends that, if possible, you attempt to assign site roles to groups instead of users. It makes it much easier to manage permissions this way than to handle it on an individual user basis. We acknowledge however that there may be cases where this isn't practical.
These are the established site roles for our installation right now.
Site Administrator
Site Administrators are able to perform essentially any task in the system.
Site Administrator-RO
Same as Site Administrator, but without the super-user permissions bypass ability. In effect, the user will be able to view the entire site, but not make any edits unless specifically allowed by ACLs.
Site Approver
The Site Approver role is a master of workflow. It carries the ability to delete workflows in process (immediately ending them and trashing the content), assign workflows to itself, thereby taking them over, and to bypass workflow completely in Sites that have workflow requirements.
Site PageMaster
The Page Master role permits editors to change region configurations per-page on each page's edit screen. You might use this if the user needs to create XHTML blocks and assign them to pages in a very arbitrary fashion.
Site Publisher
Site Publishers are able to publish files that are writeable by their group(s).
Site Contributor
Site Contributors are able to read and edit assets, but are not able to perform publish operations.
Site Architect
Site Architects can move and rename assets. In Cascade 6.7+ this is done using a separate tab named "Move/Rename."
Transports/SFTP Access
Transports can be created by delegate admnistrators via the Site Manager, which is available in your department's "MAIN site, e.g. WEBCOMM-MAIN.
Database and Filesystem transports have not been adequately tested to be made available yet. It is unlikely that local filesystem transports will ever be made available. Until Hannon Hill is able to produce UI restrictions preventing administrators from creating Local Filesystem transports, all transport creation will be handled through the Site Manager.
User Accounts
User accounts can be provisioned through the Site Manager. After a NetID is entered, the Site Manager will forward you on to their account page. After this process is complete, you may add them to any applicable user groups you desire.
User Groups
As a partnering developer, you aren't able to create arbitrary groups in the system. You are however able to create groups within the context of a site. When you open the Site Manager, you should see a list of sites in your department. Creating groups through the SM assists us in keeping everyone's permission structure from colliding. Your group names will take on the form:
(DEPTPREFIX-SITENAME-GROUPNAME)
Since you can see all of the groups you belong to, you will be able to re-use groups between sites if you like. Just keep in mind that if you decide to split site responsibilities later, it may be more of a headache than continually managing the groups separately. Also, because a lot of end-user experience things are tied to user groups you may consider it useful to create a group for each user scenario on a per-site basis.
Control Group vs Site Group
As a sub-administrator and service partner of the Cascade installation, you belong to a control group for the sites which you have created. The name of the control group matches the 32 character identifier in the system for a site object. This control group is assigned to a system role that has a few more permissions than the Site Groups you might create will have. For example, members of control groups can edit groups to which they belong, whereas members of Site Groups cannot. This means that when you create a Site Group and create a User, attaching the User to that group, the User won't be able to make changes to that group even though you can.
Process for Loading New Users
To load a new user who can do everything with your department's sites, you'll need to:
To load a new sub-administrator into a site in your department:
To load a new developer or contributor into a site in your department:
If your user group (DEPT-NEWSITE-Developers) is not already attached to a site role in DEPT-NEWSITE, you will need to do that now.
The key relationship here is Site->Site Role->User Group->User.
Reading this backwards yields the means for getting a user into a site: a user must belong to a user group, which is associated with a Site Role, which is associated with a Site. To manage the Site Role associations for a given site, click on the Cascade Server logo (next to Home), then click on Site Management, select your site, click on edit, and click on the roles sub-tab.
We realize that the options presented appear to be very similar, but there are a lot of subtle differences, and you'll have to analyze how you want to work with others in your department to determine the best structure for your collection of sites.