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Site Manager

Web Communications delegates certain administrative functions to departments with their own web developers. This page describes settings custom to our installation. Please visit Hannon Hill's knowledge base for full Cascade Server documentation.

Versioning

Our Cascade installation is set with a 50-version limit on assets. Recycle bin settings are on a per-site basis. Please contact webcomm-support with any requests to recover older data.

File Uploads

The current maximum file size allowed for files (including .zip files and site imports) is 50,000KB, or 48.8MB. This limit is established to provide adequate space for most multimedia files other than videos. Files larger than this should be stored outside of Cascade, either on an external host or directly on your web server.

Publishing

Cascade Server uses a parallel publishing queue. Each site is permitted to actively 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 recommend a minimum interval of 30 minutes for pages that use Feed blocks and require frequent updates. Publish time can be decreased by unchecking test destinations and excluding infrequently changed content (such as css and image directories).

Site Manager

Each group of partnering developers is assigned a short department/unit name that will be prefixed to all sites and groups (for example, "McC" for McCormick). This will be referred to throughout this document as DEPTPREFIX. Your department/unit starts out with one site: DEPTPREFIX-MAIN. Within it is an external link to xSite Manager, which provides the following utilities for managing sites that match your prefix.

Site Creation

Creating sites is handled through the Site Manager. Your sites will follow the naming convention DEPTPREFIX-SITENAME. Do not rename your sites from this scheme (as this will hide them from Site Manager).

To create a site, simply enter a name for the site in the input box and click create. The system will create a site in Cascade for you, grant the -ADMIN group Administration permissions (see below), and forward you to the site settings page. Note that no site roles are set by default, so you will probably want to set these up first (for example, adding your -ADMIN group to the Site Administrator role).

Site Copy

To copy an existing site, use Site Manager. Some units have set up an empty site shell with their preferred directory structure, base assets, and asset factories as a template for creating new sites. As with site creation,  Administration folder write permission will be granted to your -ADMIN group. Additionally, any existing roles will be copied.

We strongly recommend storing common templates, formats, and CSS in a single DEPT-Commons area (instead of making copies) to avoid having to change multiple instances of these files later.

Transports

Transports for SFTP or FTP can be created via the Site Manager. Transports allow you to publish your site to a departmental web server. Database and Filesystem transports are not available for security reasons. Once you have created a Transport, create a Destination specifying the path to the directory where you wish to publish and assigning applicable user groups.

Note: Departments only have read access to Transport containers. If you try to create a Transport directly, you will receive the error "Write permissions are required on the destination folder to move an asset into that folder."

User Accounts

User accounts can be created 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 should add the user to applicable groups by editing those groups. Please do not remove yourself or other users from the ALL-USERS group, since this is used to send broadcast messages.

To load a new developer who can do everything in your department sites:

  1. Add the user to Cascade using the "Provision a NetID" form in Site Manager.
  2. Add the user to the ADMIN group by editing that group under Administration > Users, Groups, & Roles.

To load a new contributor with limited access to a site in your department:

  1. Add the user to Cascade using the "Provision a NetID" form in Site Manager.
  2. Add the user to a group associated with the site they will be editing, e.g. DEPTPREFIX-SITENAME-Contributors, which belongs to specific site roles for DEPT-SITENAME. Typically, contributor groups should be assigned to the Publisher, Architect, and Contributor site roles (see below).

User Groups

Partnering developers can create groups through Site Manager using the naming convention DEPTPREFIX-SITENAME-GROUPNAME. Groups can be re-used between sites, but establishing them on a per-site basis usually results in less confusion.

Developers outside of Web Communications typically belong to a department-specific ADMIN group. This group is assigned to a system role that has more permissions than the Site Groups created via the Site Manager, in that members can: