Monthly Archives: September 2012

Today’s tip: prevent publishing

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If you have a page that’s not yet ready to be seen by the whole world, or if you’re holding onto a copy of a page that’s been removed from the website, you probably don’t want it to be published.

But if you publish a whole folder…then everything inside it gets published. 🙁

It doesn’t have to be that way! You can set any page, file, or folder to remain unpublished. Check out our new wiki page, Preventing items from being published, for instructions.

Cascade User Group Event Notes

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  1. Introductions: Susan had everyone introduce themselves to one person they didn’t know, as they came in, since we didn’t have time to go around. She also introduced Elaine [me], and talked about our new designer, Justin, who starts on October 1.
  2. Goals (Susan): we’ll be holding these meetings more regularly! We can’t cover everything that was requested, nor everything we think you ought to know. We want you to get the highlights, and to know that you can always ask us for help, whether it’s fixing an error or reworking your whole site.
  3. Web Team Plans (Susan): two notable items:
    • An upcoming update will require republishing everything on the website. We’ll send an email to let you know, sometime within the next month. That makes now a good time to clean up your site!
    • We’re working on making the website more responsive, so it works better on mobile devices, starting with the most visible areas for recruitment, retention, and fundraising.
  4. Consistency (Susan): a reminder that CMS users are important, providing the critical content that site visitors need. Keeping a consistent look and structure helps those visitors know where they are and where they need to go.
  5. Resources (Susan): took a look at the Web Resources page, including the CMS Help and our brand new form for requesting assistance. Also, we’ll be moving the Cascade CMS documentation into the main Computing Help Wiki, but the Web Resources page will still get you there.
  6. CMS Updates(Susan): a few little things:
    • Now when you move/rename a page, it automatically unpublishes the page.
    • With speed improvements, no more need to check Publisher Status to see if your pages have published yet.
    • And some little navigation improvements that are easy to show, hard to describe in words.
  7. Formatting (Elaine): mostly talking about “what things break for you.”
    • Acknowledging that sometimes text gets horribly mangled, and it happens to all of us, especially when pasting from Word. In some browsers you can use the Paste as Plain Text button, otherwise a two-step paste (Word > Notepad/Textedit > Cascade) can help. If something’s hopelessly mangled, contact the Web Team to get faster clean-up, or use the Versions feature (under More) to go back to an older version of the page.
    • Demonstrated two link checking tools: the W3C Link Validator, and a Firefox Add-in.
  8. Questions, in which we covered:
    • A bit about images and how to align them to one side or the other.
    • Bulk uploading (go to Tools > Zip Archive)
    • Google Analytics, showing a report we created to help one site understand what their top pages were.

Checking for broken links

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Several people asked about that in the survey we sent out before the next User Group meeting. Here’s two ways to check for broken links:

W3C Link Checker: if you want to test several pages, check “Check linked documents recursively, recursion depth” – setting the recursion depth to 1 will check all the pages linked in the side navigation.

Firefox Link Checker Add-on: allows you to see the status of links for the page that you’re visiting. Right-click on the page, or click on the Tools menu, and select “Check Page Links”