#cascadeserver @hannon_hill

TheCollege.syr.edu launched in February 2010, first time a CMS had been used to manage online contentPurpose: repository for academic information(the “business” side of TheCollege).

ASNews.syr.edulaunched in September 2010, a sister sitePurpose: showcase activities, research, student and alumni accolades, news and events unique to Arts and Sciences.

Based on Press Releases (“Stories”) Primary Categories aligned to the

academics of TheCollege:◦Sciences

◦Humanities

◦People Classify each Story as “News” or “Event” Current Stories and searchable Archive

#cascadeserver @hannon_hill

Press Releases created by two staff writers SU Calendar (VT Calendar application)

provides xml feed of daily events Social Media postings Video (YouTube Channel and Ensemble

streaming server) Custom Slideshow Stories Outside News “snippets” as links

Content will always have some updated material (daily)

Story selection and rotation determined by the editorial staff (of two)

Any moderation or approval of content done offline (no workflows required)

Auto-Publish nightly with optional on-demand as needed

# Story pages

2010 (95)2011 (142)2012 (174)2013 (110)Over 500 total to date…(adding 6-7 stories weekly during academic year)

In addition to TheCollege and ASNews sites, my technical staff manages: 18 department, 3 intranet, 5 cultural, 40 research sites and the online faculty directory, for a total 3500 pages. (All in Cascade)

LOW MAINTENANCE PREDICTABLE EFFORT INVOLVED CREATE ONCE, USE MANY Get a lot of mileage out of a “Story” Editorial components can be used in

multiple places in ASNews and in our other web sites

Present the content in such a way to look like more (especially in periods of low academic activity)

Home Page

CURRENTStory Pages

Story PagesArchives

2013201220112010

“CURRENT”List Pages

Center column is the editable region

Left Sidebar:navigation plus up to three additional blocks

Right Column contains the calendar feed

default regionStory Page

This area contains the content we repurpose to other pages

Metadata assigns the Category affiliation(s) and the designation as News or Event item

Based on the checked affiliations, this page will be included on both the

People and the Science-Math listing pages

Event or News designation is a preference of our editors

We decided not to include the photo as a thumbnail –but could have.

Story Page in relation to List Pages

Story Page Resides in the Newsevents_2013 folder

A reference to it is placed in the appropriate “Current” folder (Events or News)

Story shows up on the List or

Lists checked in the

metadataand shows up in ALL-Current

WHY?

Our Writers understood references

They could see references and move them around in the folders

They could delete a reference and not panic

They could recreate a reference if wanted to rerun a story

They stopped deleting the list pages by accident

The story pages stayed in their original folder and the links always stay the sameThey stopped calling and emailing me!

Home Page:Stories in rotation (3+)

4 more feature stories

Only a small amount of custom information accompanies the Story Page link in a Rotating Story

Only a Rotating Story requires a different size picture (4 smaller features can use same size picture as the Story Page)

In The News Left Sidebar: external recognition of our stories lends authority(and helps our search ranking!)

Home Page - Home Page - Reuse other people’s content…

EventsRight Sidebar:

XML feed from the SU News calendar

Filtering is applied at either the inbound feed link or in the XSLT

This feed will pick up Events that don’t have a Story Page

Events drop off after they occur (at the calendar level) and combined with daily publish is always current

Various ways to sort items from the feed, including

By Category(Humanities, Sciences, People)

By department(English, Physics)

By number to display and placement

Combination of feed filters and XSLT filtering

Twitter feed tends to reinforce what is already in the Stories or Calendar (so we added it)

Facebook feed is a potential addition but is less legible and more repetitive

YouTube channel is linked in the Multimedia sidebar…and…

We havea modifiedStory Page for video embeds…

That draws from an Arts and SciencesYouTube Channel with a subgroup of playlists

We have tested Hannon Hill’s video embed tools in the WYS

For accessibility compliance, we only use videos which are captioned

The “Ticker Line” features academic links

Because (virtually) all our sites are in Cascade, we have the ability to cross reference content easily

Cascade’s Page Chooser has recently become one of my favorite tools to replicate content to other areas.

Same basic functionality as Category Lists with different ordering

and an upper right navigation created by an index block that counts the List pages within annual archives

List Pages in archives are restricted to a numerical range of pages so the list does not become too long.

The Story Page link does not “expire” when it’s referenced by outside media or our own web sites. We can add a link on a faculty member’s personal page to the Story Page that featured them-and it will always work.

Stories in archives update any changes in sidebar or header/footer as well (2010 stories get new feeds, links to social media) and are republished nightly as well.

So much of the ASNews site is text it’s highly searchable

Story Page Master Elements added at the Template or Configuration Set Level(they all share the same side elements)

Story Page has sub-versions: video, slideshow, notesField) all of which do not have a right sidebar

Home Page is unique, has its own Template

Category List Pages (current) share a Configuration set but have Left side elements added at the Page level. Archives are basically the same with an added block and format for the page count-and nothing is customized at the page level.

I looked at what sidebars needed to drop into every page in a section and planned around that.

Content draws directly from the story page and does not require rewriting

Changes made in the links to convert from browse path to url

Publish to a folder on the file server instead of the web server

Weekly mailing and event-specific

Our Physics department has been using a Cascade email format for weekly notifications to faculty, staff and students

From August 25-September 14, 2013 ASNews had 1,800 unique visitors (3 weeks)

A typical month during the academic year is 3,000 unique visitors

We see outside promotion driving viewers to ASNews (we want that!)

George Saunders Video on YouTube posted Friday night at 5pm. This followed the announcement his book just made the NY Times bestseller list. Link added to ASNews

By Monday morning, thousands of views of the video and the Story Pages featuring Saunders were getting lots of hits

To date, Saunders video has over 40,000 views.

ContentDesign

Reuse ContentStrategically

TechnicalDesign

Consistent User Interface

CascadeTOOLS

lcfranci@syr.edu

For reference

Index Block Listing Current

Index Block Listing Current

XSLT Listing Current (Science-Math)

Page Chooser DTD

Page Chooser XSLT