- What is Cascade CMS and how does it work?
- Submitting vs. publishing
What is Cascade CMS and How Does It Work?
Cascade CMS is the content management system used to manage Langara’s website (http://langara.ca).
The diagram below demonstrates how Cascade CMS works.
Cascade CMS Publishing Model
Cascade CMS: On the left half, CMS users log in and interact with the CMS software. Users can create and edit assets — whether they are web pages, files (images, PDFs) or folders.
WWW: On the right half, a network of load balanced servers host static HTML web pages that are viewable by our site visitors.
E.g. http://langara.ca/departments/human-resources
The load balanced network helps alleviate stress by distributing visitor traffic evenly across all 3 servers. The Langara.ca site is replicated on all 3 servers to ensure visitors are seeing the latest content.
The separation between the two ecosystems helps create a layer of security and robustness. Should the CMS software fail, Langara’s website will continue to operate. However, this model of publishing comes at a cost of speed and limited dynamic functionality.
Submitting vs. Publishing
Getting updates to the live website is a two-step process: Submitting and Publishing.
Submitting
On the Cascade CMS side, we log in and interact with the CMS tool to create or edit our web pages. Once we have completed creating or editing pages, we submit our changes to commit them to Cascade CMS.
Our changes are stored in the CMS database where we can then preview our changes on the a dynamic version of the site. I use the term “dynamic” because pages on the CMS side interact with the database and pull information to generate the content on the fly.
At this point however, our updates have not reached the live website on the World Wide Web. We still need to publish our updates.
Publishing
After submitting our updates to the CMS, we still need to publish them to the live website (http://langara.ca).
When the publish function is invoked, the CMS creates a static HTML file on the Load Balanced Servers and it should now be viewable to site visitors on the World Wide Web.
Note: You may need to refresh your browser to see any changes that are published.
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