Monthly Archives: June 2012

testing…

So I’m running into the main problem with Cascade, which is also the main strength: it’s not especially dynamic. Adding a randomly selected item? It only selects that item when the page is published. So not on each load. Which is why people do ridiculous things with JS? (I know from doing ridiculous things with JS.)

We’re getting lots of requests to add blog feeds to people’s Cascade pages. Which is all well & good, there’s even a block type to handle it. Then it came to me: will it update the page when there’s a new blog post? You’d think so, but I honestly have no idea. So I’m adding this post to check a test page that has this blog’s feed as a block.

week in review: thinking about Cascade

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.

Week one in review

AKA: I can haz teh brain fry.

Really, it’s been good, but there’s a lot to learn and a lot to adjust to, plus I’ve spent big chunks of the last two days in meetings. I’m starting to get a glimmer of understanding how Cascade works, which is pretty different from the CMSs I’m accustomed to have worked. I did my very first (tiny!) content edit; ironically (?) it was correcting a typo in the name of my last employer. I’ve got a small editing project to do across multiple sites. I’m going to be working on a subsite project with Susan. I’ve got an idea for something really new that I haven’t any idea how to accomplish.

Plus, you know: setting up my workspace, physical & virtual; getting paperwork filled out; meeting at least 50 people in four days, etc. All the usual new job whatnot.

I’m still glad to be here, at least.