Power has a price
Overall Satisfaction with Cascade Server
Cascade Server is used to maintain the official website for the college primarily devoted to recruitment and alumni/parent relations. It also supports many official office websites. It allowed us to transfer content maintenance duties to various office staff involved with the content development rather than funnel all updates through Web Communications.
Pros
- Very flexible. The system is based in XML which allows for a lot of flexibility for distributed and syndicated content with XSLT and Velocity.
- Large and active user community in Higher Ed. This system is used by many other higher education institutions so there are many relevant resources beyond the vendor and Higher Ed is an industry where other institutions help each other.
- Distinct separation of content from layout. It is very easy to break content out into separate blocks for reuse while leaving a template and layout intact.
Cons
- No inherit control over types of content that users can upload such as pdf, jpg, or other files. This has to be done via regular expressions. It's also possible for users to create files/folders that don't use web-safe naming conventions.
- Requires an experienced XML/XSLT developer to implement and structure. Because it's so flexible it's also very complicated to implement a structured solution that allows users to maintain content without getting frustrated with layout and formatting challenges with the WYSIWYG.
- The system doesn't support the latest XML/XSLT standards so you must use a lesser known scripting language Velocity to accomplish more advanced tasks.
- We have distributed content maintenance duties to other areas of the campus thus freeing up resources. With a userbase of primarily infrequent activity and lack of general technical competence the support needs are also high but we still come out ahead.
- Because of user frustration and extended development needs our reputation has suffered.
WordPress was never evaluated when we decided on Cascade around 2008. We looked for an enterprise level system that would have vendor support and had more developer resources at the time. Our resources have diminished so having plugin solutions like WordPress would solve many user requests. WordPress has a much broader community of users for reference material when trying to solve problems.
Using Cascade Server
Cascade Server Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Comments
Please log in to join the conversation