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Cascade Server User Conference Presentation Ideas

May 1, 2011 - Matt Carter

I have a few possible session ideas. I haven’t been to the User Conference before, so some of these may have been done before or may not be good fits.

Using a Data Definition Block for site configuration

We use a standard Data Definition Block on all sites to do basic site configuration.

The block is assigned to various regions in the template to set:

• Department Logo
• Footer - website comments link
• Google Analytics code
• Contact Block – may contain parent dept. contact info, creates hcard microformat
• Site Search - optional
• Site Title – used in <title> tag.

Using XSLT w/ the flickr api to make a photo gallery page

Using a set of XSLT scripts that leverages the flickr api to query and pull content from flickr groups, photosets, etc to display them on your webpage.  This is done w/o feed blocks.

Example:  http://wcmsdev.unm.edu/flickr.html

1 Template = 3+ layouts

How we use 1 template to create 3 layout options.  Using metadata and some post processing XSLT we give users the ability to easily select between 3 layouts (2 column, 3 column, full width).

This gives user the flexibility to easily change the layout of page from 2 to 3 columns by simply selecting a dropdown on the page.  Advanced users can even take the layout further by modifying the site.css file to reposition various regions.

News/Blogs at UNM

How we leverage Cascade to provide departments with a news/blog system for their site.

News includes:

• Individual News Pages
• Expandable Archive block
• Yearly archives
• Monthly archives
• Recent news Page
• Recent News Block
• RSS feed
• Blogs include the ability to leverage external commenting tools like Disqus.  Comments can be turned off or on for each post.

This is accomplished with a set of shared XSLT formats, predefined Asset factory configurations, and site-specific indexes.