Hannon Hill Updates Web CMS to v6.2, Improvements Aplenty

By David Roe (@druadh20) Jul 14, 2009

Hannon Hill (news, site) keeps tinkering away with its Cascade Server v6.x Web CMS, which today was released as v6.2.

After only a month of testing Cascade Server 6.2 Beta, which was released on June 9th, the official release of v6.2 incorporates all the major changes in the beta version plus a few fixes.

There are a number of other upgrades that come with v6.2, including upgrades to its Velocity Tools, and Folder Copy improvements, but it is really the Sites aspect of Cascade Server that HH has really been looking at — a feature that first saw the light of day in v6.0.

Building on v6.0

With the official release of the Cascade Server 6.0 in April, Hannon Hill said it had achieved the speeds it wanted as that version was focused on back-end performance enhancements, flexibility to manage more users and new additions including Sites.

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The Cascade Server v6.2 user interface

An XML-based web content management system aimed at medium-sized organizations, Cascade Server includes AJAX enabled WYSIWYG editing, file management, collaboration and compliance support.

V6.0, as might be expected included a number of upgrades on the v5.x series, many of which appeared on their communities ‘must-have’ list.

The changes could be grouped into over 40 changes together, covering two principal areas: Roles and Sites.

However, it would seem that HH was not completely happy with the outcome — or if they were they had a funny way of showing it — as they went to a beta version of 6.2 only six weeks later, and produced this final version of 6.2 only four weeks after that.

Three Principal Upgrades

The three principal ways in which Sites has been upgraded has been cross-site linking, template sharing across sites and Velocity Engine enhancements.

Cross-Site Linking

Just to put the cross-site linking feature in perspective; Hannon Hill has as its target clients higher education, government, and technology companies. The majority of these companies will have multiple website, and the majority of those will be decentralized.

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Hannon Hill CMS cross-site linking

For efficiency and brand identity reasons, it is better that multiple people can manage multiple websites from the same system. Adding Sites to the Cascade Server system enables HH users segment and manage content relative to a particular website. And one of the ways it does this is through cross-site linking.

Cross-site linking gives users a number of different ways to manage links in content. The different options available depend on the kind of asset being used that will contain the link, the type of link needed, and the target asset for that link.

The WYSIWYG editor contains the linking buttons to create links in the pages, or assets. Developers will typically use specified link formats to create links in templates, files, pages, or blocks.

In Cascade 6.2, it is possible to create links in content to assets existing on different sites. This is particularly useful when linking between pages on different sites or when linking to centrally managed support assets like CSS and JavaScript files.

Template Sharing

The second major enhancement is Template Sharing across sites. This adds a complimentary level to the cross-site linking as it does the same thing with templates as the cross-links do with links.