And…it’s the end of week four! Already! And I haven’t posted here since the end of week one.

This week I really dug in to Cascade; I created a custom content type, with the goal of making the big picture on the homepage something that can be clicked on. (The specific details of what that will look like are yet to be determined.) It’s pretty convoluted, really, and I haven’t entirely worked out which things ought to be done before which other things. But I got it working in “CMS2”, which is the installation for testing & development. In theory this should be the template for other sorts of structured data: alumni profiles, events calendar, etc. The part that I was afraid couldn’t be done, or would at least be hugely difficult, was selecting a single item at random…and as it turns out, there was a “common” XSLT formatter already in the system to do that very thing. So…yay.

I’m also beginning to realize that one could — again, in theory — set up the catalog entirely through the CMS, instead of having a bunch of PHP helper scripts. Cascade can (via XSLT) do some pretty crazy things with XSLT. There’s so much that it could be doing, if I can just figure out how it wants me to do things, instead of fighting with it. (And, honestly, instead of wanting it to be Drupal, which is what I’m accustomed to.) Because it can be built smart, with reusable components and structured data, which is really the key of any CMS.