Category: Professional

His group is similar to ours, in re: being under advancement/external affairs.

The big issue of each issue having its own look/feel for the most part.

config set for each issue

(at what point do magazines go digital-first?)

structure is fairly consistent

2 thoughts: put magazine in its own “site”, and use it as testing for rwd &c.

when IS the next magazine due?

like the folder setup, seems like there’s a lot of repeating of files, which always makes me a little o.O

It’s funny, 4.x in Cascade & 4.x in Drupal seem to have been almost equally crazy, although in noticably different ways.

they came from home-grown CMS.

one of the presenters has a fairly noticable accent, another presentation I’ll have to do extra listening.

wonder if Luke was at the same early user conference that they were at.

default examples? (I’ve found some useful things in those files.)

I need to join the listserve(s). several ppl have mentioned it.

production & test – prod goes to 2 public load servers, plus a “QA” for seeing things in process. plus they have a test instance that also goes to QA server.

_common_ folder was for resources that actually go to the server, CSS, JS, etc. – with some aliases via httpd.conf

interesting image of their (old) folder structure. also, config setup diagram.

seriously, even with the “old” (global) way, their setup was pretty damn sharp.

[oh great. I need the damn access code to get online. thank goodness for the WP app.]

using PHP includes for some of their navigation? why use Cascade, then? Really.

wondering if I ought to have gone to the workflow session. it’s interesting, but I really want to see how they got to the next thing!

“Artemis” single source dynamic content delivery? Wonder what that’s about.

interesting analogy to his brother’s gas station moving from separate pumps to the single pump with buttons for different gas: a lot of time/work/money up front, but huge savings ove time.

they had ~390 templates, ~600 config sets, ~350 users. the hell? ok, even I know that’s crazy-pants.

test instance of cascade “took over” QA server for a while. Interesting.

still wondering if we could do site migration in stages.

started with shared assets site, moving _common_ to _assets site – again, for shared css/js/images – the underscore mostly just for alphabetization reasons. with global templates (2, could be 1), global content types/configurations, and sample content. still looks really complicated to me.

then the main sites and really complicated sites.

created site migration inventory spreadsheet. love that sort of thing.

new sites had their own content types and shared some of the common ones.

and a spreadsheet of users to create new roles & groups.

heck, if I can do what I want to do over the next year, I should submit a presentation proposal. I can’t be as mind-blowing as UCDavis, but I think I can do some pretty cool stuff.

data definition for google analytics keys, and then an index block, and data definition blocks. makes sense. although I’m honestly wondering if we should move all the e.e sites to the SAME GA key, since we don’t have as diffused needs. (OTOH, I bet there’s some groups that would really appreciate having their own separate thing. there’s a whole thing to talk about in re GA.)

should have gone to the workflow session. I still have no idea how the hell workflows are supposed to work.

now only have 2 templates, about 10 config sets, have increased to 450 contributors.

the common “site” thing was clever, but caused problems in test. not really sure what they did to fix, sounds like maybe they went back to aliasing. (altho we could probly get some speed boosts by having a subdomain for those sorts of assets.)

they were able to get schedules (time/day/room?) into Cascade. could I do something with R25 api? so that you wouldn’t have to log in to my.e.e? is that even a good idea?

q: share block content across sites? yes, like what they’re doing with the common thing. (this guy from alaska down the row from me was asking good Qs yesterday, too.) users to have to browse to the different site, but my instinct is that it’s like picking from a library.)

didn’t really understand the question.

q: did they investigate using web services to migrate? no, altho some ppl do.

I met these folks earlier today. Nice people, sounds like they’re doing interesting stuff.

Wow. This is pretty intense. Also, they PREPARED CONTENT AHEAD OF TIME.

This is almost more than I can handle right now. I don’t even.

It’s a bit like what I’ve been doing with content types, but even more so.

Like I want a whole day of playing with this. Because right now it makes my brain hurt.

Blocks with data definitions is apparently the key.

They have a handout!

Wow, that’s a hell of a diagram.

“Blockhead” (index block? is that like the calling-page index block? it must be.) knows which blocks have been included, and then there’s a region in the template that adds the right css/js. THIS IS AWESOME.

I’ve done so much knitting today that I may have accidentally made my cover too big. :\

Boggling. Really, truly boggling.

There’s a block that does a bunch of configuration stuff. It reminds me a LOT of theme settings in Drupal, but with a bit more detail.

Also, using a block with a data definition for the Contact block?!

Wait, is this per page?! OMG. (Everything about this is OMG.)

If you combine what they’re doing with the configuration (etc) blocks with applying XSLT to a template, you could get something pretty trick.

I will compare this session to the one I saw at a Drupal thing in West Seattle where poplarware (Jennifer) talked about CCK (and maybe views, I don’t remember), as in: a bunch of stuff clicked at once and I could start to really understand how to do stuff.

This one may be even nerdier than the previous ones, because it’s a very particular technical thing.

(there’s Justin’s doppelganger again.)

Is this going to be another knitting session, so I don’t get hopelessly distracted by Twitter?

Chrome XML Tree extension. Just FYI.

Dammit. Velocity.

Oh, this is like the thing I built. Only I like my thing better.

json? with sliderjs. i bet there’s xslt out there to generate json.

start-code vs start-root-code (and she didn’t know why she used the one she did) escapetool.js?

“if you have departments that want to use the same exact slideshow” — when the hell does THAT happen?

a questioner just described EXACTLY the same thing that I did. also: thought: zip archive to import all the pics, then go into each one to set up the alt/caption?

random generation of content via js? with a rational fallback, that’s not a terrible idea. will have to look into that for big block on homepage.

there was some other idea that I just had, but got distracted by the example, and errors therein.

Oh, now I remember: using hosted jQuery with fallback to local version, because ppl often have it cached.

Oh dear, heavy accent. Which is fine, but will definitely take some extra effort to attend to.

SOAP? Really? Not REST? (Not that I know much about either.)

Anything with bulk changes. Is this where the “bug all page managers” thing I want to do comes in?

Oh….also could use it to create a form elsewhere and then turn the submissions into assets. I guess this is the thing that I was thinking about for calendar and/or catalog.

hmmm…authentication piece could be tricky. (remembering the issues with publish sets.) create a “web services” user? guy sitting  next to me said they do something like that.

idea: drupal module for writing to cascade? are there soap-related modules?!

so every time something gets edited in the CMD (for example) it also gets sent to Cascade AND published. No PHP. Automatic URLs/Page Titles. I think you could even do the preview with that technique. Maybe.

Mind blown.

And now I have a slightly better idea of how SOAP works in PHP, which seems a lot like how Ajax stuff works in JS.

Trying to decide whether I’ll want to knit during this session. (And whether I want to go to the next one at all. Neither one is really calling to me.) Transforming one kind of XHTML into another XHTML? oh, hold on: this means i could make the content talk to the navigation so I could do that “you are here” thing I’ve been wanting, WITHOUT js. conditional js, based on what the content is. maybe obviates some things i’ve looked at content types to do. I did take out my knitting, tho I’ve had to stop a couple of times. this is pretty stony, now that he’s getting into it, but he started with a lot of talking about talking. start-root-code THIS. this is what i wanted to do all along. but wait: does this mean you have to put the content into the asset format as actual stuff? “[div id=”hideBodyId”]special[/div]” – how odd. but the 2nd format removes those. could you put a definition list in the first format? that would be super nerdy. www.iu.edu/~pagriet/csuc12/ oh, now I get it: you attach a format to the template in the template editing interface. (a really basic thing that was confusing me the whole time.) lightbulb just came on for reals. instead of all ids – “hideTitle” “hideBreadcrumbs” or “showBreadcrumbs” – use classes “hide” and “show” and then ids (or definition list) to know which thing.

I’ve never actually been to a conference for a specific vendor. It’s weird to see a presentation that includes how they moved into new offices.

Still wondering what exactly it means for Cascade to have “full HTML5 support” — does that just mean that you can use new tags in content without them being stripped out?

Yep, this is the talk talk talk blah blah blah session I thought it might be.

Topic-based user groups.

Oh hey, the KB might suck less.

Huh, this is actually still just the welcome, not the roadmap. The actual roadmap session might be better?

…which starts…now.

“the engineers are the employees with beards”

so no women, then?

this is probably the sort of session where I ought to be knitting instead of writing snarky journal entries or tweets, mostly so I don’t miss stuff.

“modules are a little vague” – adding functions w/out so much coding? no idea what he’s talking about.

focusing on usability. hrmph. but they’re talking about it as “features” and not so much as “omg working in this makes me want to yell at something.”

Auto-saving drafts. On the one hand: I love that in WordPress. OTOH: I gather drafts have caused horrible disasters.

All of this contextual editing is great, I guess, but what I really want is for someone to be on the actual website, and when they see something that needs fixing, be able to click a button and jump to the right spot in the CMS.

Customizing the toolbar! I was going to see if I could hack into that myself. 🙂 And the equivalent of content/tag filters in Drupal. (No, you CAN’T create an h1, rather than making it look ugly and they don’t understand why.)

o look: an automatic report that would’ve let us know about that thing that was probably broken for 6 months.

site-wide link check! that’s actually pretty cool. per-asset link check on publish? should already exist, but does that include external or just internal? should look that up.

I think Susan might especially appreciate some of the reports stuff.

more about modules:

Guy in front of me is looking at info about contribute. Hilarious.

twitter feeds module. oh dear, I think that means my recent very

built-in image sliders. I wonder if that’s going to suffer from the same problems as all the carousel etc modules in Drupal, which meant tha I ended up preferring getting Views to generate a list and then including the cycle lite jquery plugin in the theme.

“give users the ability to create these things” — oh wait, that’s basically the same thing as the image gallery thing I built this summer? :\

any ARIA support?

ways to indicate that an image is “decorative” rather than meaningful.

“only a single h1 element” — but if using headers, sections, articles, is that still best practice?

so there’s an accessibility checker? where’s that? but apparently it only checks the asset’s content?

ARIA in TinyMCE. that’s kinda cool.

50% of site redesigns of projects they work on are including response. apparently session tomorrow abt mobile will be focused on RWD, so maybe I will go.

looking at better support for HTML5 Boilerplate, Twitter Bootstrap, etc. looking to export some of their services projects to Github, sites that you could actually just import into a site. Innnnnteresting.

ah, one of the HH employees just responded to the single snarky tweet that I hashtagged. #awkward

SO MANY things we can’t do until we convert to “Sites”. Dammit.

Two minutes left, in theory.

Seriously, I’m beginning to hate the term “user” when referring to people who do stuff inside a CMS. (this isn’t a Cascade complaint specifically.) How hard is it to call people authors, editors, or managers?

Also, the word “blast” in re marketing can die in a fire. (email, facebook post, whatever. DIAF.)

Gah, missed a bunch about performance improvements while copying (some) of that into tweets. Whoops.