Getting Started with Cascade Blogs

Getting Started with Cascade Blogs

Introducing Blogs at Rowan

Cascade assumes blogs are just another Cascade site so building pages and publishing will work just as they do with other sites. However, blogs contain some specific features that allow you to display your information as "news" (by publication date and/or by category) rather than grouping your pages soley by way of tasks or topics.

To get a Cascade blog, submit a request using our new project request form at go.rowan.edu/WebProjectRequest.

This looks familiar!

If you have a Cascade blog, we assume you have already built a Cascade web site or at least have taken a look at the general Cascade documentation. If not, take a moment now to find out:

  1. How to find your way around the Cascade Dashboard
  2. How to find your way around your content
  3. How to add pages and other assets such as files or images
  4. About saving, submitting and publishing pages and assets in Cascade
  5. Where to find basic Troubleshooting information so you can:

Blog Asset (Content) Types

You will notice when you click "Add Content" your blog has different kinds of assets than you would find in your ordinary Cascade web site.  You can add files and images in much the same way as you would normally, but instead of pages and folders you will find the following new content types:

  • Post: A post is the the meat and potatoes of your blog. You can think of these as pages that hold stories or log entries. They should be filed into folders by the date of publication. Unlike a regular Cascade page, you MUST give each post its own publication date so that Cascade will know how to display it.
  • Category Listing: Category Listings are a kind of page that give you a way of sorting your content (your posts or articles) by category as well as by date. Remember, since this is primary a date driven site, even when sorted into categories, your content will then be sorted by publication date.
    NOTE: You can only build Category Listing pages for categories that already exist in your blog. If you want to create a new category, you will need to request it by submitting a support ticket to https://rowan.edu/webrequest.
  • Yearly Folder: Cascade offers a way to view all the stories for a year on a yearly Listing page. These Listing pages depend on your keeping your posts sorted into folders by month and by year. When you create a new yearly folder (something you should only need to do once a year!) you will also automagically create:
    • folders for every month in that year,
    • an "index" page or article Listing for the whole year.
  • Contact Block: Use these assets to hold contact information for sections or posts that can be displayed on the right hand column of Posts and Listings. Keep that information in one block, use it in many places, update it in one spot.
  • Social Media Block: You can add social media information to the right column of Posts and Listings. Here again, a single block can be displayed on many pages so that you only need to update in one place.