Cascade CMS Reviews & Product Details

Very customizable and powerful once you learn and understand the underlying data structures. Comprehensive REST API that allows for interaction with the CMS using whatever method you typically would.

They're always adding new features, and actively soliciting feedback about how to make it better. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Setting stuff up takes a lot of technical knowhow, which could be a problem for non-technical administrators. Because it's so flexible, it can sometimes be difficult to decide what direction is best. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's a well-organized platform that's easy to use and train people on/in. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Brush up on your Velocity. The building blocks necessary to build out an experience presents somewhat of a learning curve. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Cascade is, very nearly, infinitely customizable. It uses either XML or Velocity to build the backend for creating and updating content. The outputs are extraordinarily flexible. We moved from an HTML front end to leveraging a design system in order to enhance the webteam's ability to build services that are easily branded to a particular school or department within the University. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The one thing that can be challenging is the speed of Cascade. The more complicated you design your page, the longer it takes for cascade to load the page for display, and edit. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that I can edit and produce sites intensively without implementing the changes until they're fully ready to go. I also like the robust use of templates and premade materials that make it easy for me to work with materials supplied by IT. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I dislike how much clicking is required to publish a change. The submit option is great when making big updates, but when making small changes to many pages on a site, it takes forever. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's easy to use, comfortable, user friendly and the it has a good User Interface and easy to navigate.

Plus it gives more options and features to use for a better work output. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Almost everything is cool and fine but some hindrance can be found while choosing different options/features which might cause some discomfort in using the tool.

Except that everything is pretty good and fine. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

You can preview how a project looks in development before pushing live. This means you can get other opinions along the way. I also like that it has version history so that you can revert back to a previous version easily and quickly. The file system set-up is well done. You are able to keep projects together by folders, with images, documents, pages all collected within the folder. This allows you to produce essentially small websites of category within your main website. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

If templates are set at a main level, it's harder to add changes to a page without using a lot of CSS. It would be nice if conditions were added within modules to better tweak results. It's like a WordPress page builder without full functionality. If modules are built into the templates, moving them about on the page really isn't an option; though you can move info within each module. This means that the design needs to be thought out much more. Another dislike is that the view while writing may not actually be what it looks like. Any rss feeds, event feeds, etc. won't populate until it's published - dev or live. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like how primary the interface is and the clear delineation of hierarchy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The dashboard is overwhelming, and I find that the specific pages I use do not appear as recent, so I always have to drill down. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like how Cascade centralizes content in XML and opens up transformation via XSLT or Velocity Script. I like the power offered via Velocity Script since there are Java standard methods and multiple built-in tools. I like also having capability of building tools in the CMS, including jQuery-based web service calls using the REST API. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I dislike how the system handles ampersands. It always demands they precede an entity and this causes errors in the system. I dislike the inefficient search capability, particularly when choosing an asset though this is reportedly being changed in a soon-to-be-released upgrade. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The most helpful feature of Cascade CMS is its flexibility. You are not locked in to a particular UI or UX - it becomes what you make of it. The CMS editing interface is yours to describe and build, the data architecture is yours to manipulate. If you can imagine it, you can build it with Cascade, with whatever your preferred server- and client-side language(s) are. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The downside to Cascade is the amount of resources needed for a fast implementation. It is resource-hungry, and if your websites get too large, you will definitely notice some speed and efficiency hits to your self-hosted solution. As long as you are willing to invest in hardware upgrades in the long term, Cascade is a great product. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.