External links in Cascade CMS

Think of links to resources outside of your site as assets you can use and reuse inside of your site. Although in Cascade CMS, you can just add a link using the text editor,  if you instead add external references as an asset you will be able to:

• Add it as an item on your navigation and
• Update all references to that external source in one place.

To create an external link

1. Start at the New Content dropdown or the New Content Widget and select External Link.
2. Follow the rules for giving the link a machine friendly name (no spaces, no special characters other than hyphens, all lower case)
3. The title will appear in your navigation if you set it so that it will appear there.
4. Choose the directory or folder you want to put it in (this is important if you want it to appear on your navigation)
5. Paste or type in the URL or address of the page you want to send your visitor to when they click on your link. For instance, to take them to the Rowan home page you'd type in "http://rowan.edu ."
6. Do NOT change the "Meta data set"
7. If you want this link to appear in your navigation, do nothing. 
8. If you want the link to open in a new window when clicked (a good idea!) click the box next to "Yes"
9. Click "Save & Preview"
10. If you want you can test your link by clicking on it in the preview screen.
11. Click "Submit" and the new asset will be added to your site content.

Now when you edit your site you can link to that external content by creating a link to that item. If that link changes in the future then all you will need to do is right click to edit and update that asset in your content tree. You update it once and the link will update where ever you used it in your site.

To Make your changes to your navigation live

IF you set this to appear on your navigation, you must publish the WHOLE folder where that navigation appears. Sometimes this means publishing your full site. To do this, right click on the folder you want to publish (the top folder for your full site) and choose "publish."  It may take a few minutes for the folders to publish.  To see the new navigation, you will need to either hard refresh the page in your browser or open it in a new browser.