Explanation: This error is created when an article is not created within a year folder.
Steps to fix:
- Move the article into a year folder. If the folder does not exist, you can create one.
When fixed, republish the article.
Explanation: This is most likely due to an article having been created in the wrong folder OR having the wrong publish date. Why is this bad? Search engines use the publish date to generate context for discovering relevant information, and may display the publish date in search results.
Steps to fix:
- Check the "Publish Date/Time" value of the article and compare it to the year folder in which it resides.
- Either edit the "Publish Date/Time" to match the year of the folder, or move the article into the correct year folder.
- If you move the article, contact digitalmarketing@jmu.edu to check for internal and external links (and possibly set up a redirect) so that there are no broken links.
When fixed, republish the article.
Explanation: Pages can have different kinds of feeds, such as News (or Article) feeds, or Event feeds. Unfortunately over time there may not be any recent articles or events to show in the feed, and it will show an embarassing "Sorry, there are no items to display right now" message.
Steps to fix:
- First, determine if you really need a feed on your page, and are willing to put in the extra work to keep it filled.
- If you want to keep it, then you will need to work with digitalmarketing@jmu.edu to see what you need to do to get items back into the feed.
Explanation: Links can be set up to automatically open an email client on the device with the "to" address pre-filled. However it is possible to not specify an email address when setting up a mailto link. Clicking on such a link will open up an empty email with no "to" address specified, leaving the user confused and alone.
Steps to fix:
- Edit the link and type in an email address after "mailto:" as shown below
Explanation: Sometimes it is easiest to just paste a url as an external link instead of taking the time to browse to the page using the internal link option. We get that. But we need to have internal links wherever possible so we can more easily do relationships checks, rather than having to manually check for external links when a file name is changed or when a file is moved or deleted.
DO NOT IGNORE THESE! The reason why external links are evil is because if the target link ever changes, you will end up getting an email saying that your page has a broken link, so you will eventually have to fix it anyway. But if all links are changed to internal links, then when a document is moved or renamed, all we have to do is look at the relationships of that document, and we will find everything that links to it quickly! Then we can just republish those relationships, and you won't have to lift a finger.
Here is an example of what you may see in an email requesting a fix:
https://www.jmu.edu/your-website/index.shtml has an empty link with link text "About Us"Steps to fix:
- If in a link list or action link
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- Select the external url text, cut it from the textbox, paste into tab (because it may redirect, but also to have as visual reference for the next step, so you can browse to the correct place)
- In your original window in which you are editing the link, select the "Internal" checkbox and browse to the file at the location, using the other tab's location as a reference if needed.
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- If in a WYSIWYG field (no "browsing" for internal links necessary - watch this hack! This works for all links, even if the page is not on a website you have access to!)
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- Edit the link in question.
- Keep "External" checkbox checked (trust me)
- Copy the value of the "Link Source" field into a new tab in your browser. This is to ensure that all redirects resolve to the final url.
- In the location bar of that tab, delete the "https://www.jmu.edu" portion (but not the slash!) of the url
- If the url ends in ".shtml", delete the ".shtml" (including the dot!)
- So if the original url was "https://www.jmu.edu/your-website/about/index.shtml" then after doing those edits it should be "/your-website/about/index" (note the slash is still at the beginning and no ".shtml" at the end)
- But if the original url was "https://www.jmu.edu/your-website/_files/myfile.pdf" (note it is not an ".shtml" file) then you wouldn't delete the extension ".pdf" because it is not ".shtml", so your resulting path would be "/your-website/_files/myfile.pdf"
- Copy and paste the text you just edited and paste it into the "Link Source" field of the link.
- IMPORTANT! Verify the link by selecting the link again, and edit it. You should see that the link is now magically "Internal"
When you're all done, submit your change, publish the page, wait for it to be published, then once again verify that the link works.
Explanation: When creating a file within the Cascade system, it does not allow files to be named with capital letters, however there are sneaky ways to get incorrectly named files into the system. I will not let you know what those are, but apparently you somehow did it, congratulations!
Step to fix:
- Rename the file in Cascade, but do not change anything except for the capital letters, typing in the lowercase version. If you do this, no links will break.
Explanation: Sometimes a video can be taken off of youtube or vimeo, leaving a broken video on your site.
Steps to fix:
- Determine if there is another video to specify, or if the video needs to be made public. Otherwise, remove the video from the page.
Explanation: There are a few special folders in our Cascade implementation, one of which is a "_blocks" folder. Folders named "_blocks" are supposed to contain only Cascade blocks, not publishable documents. Mixing up both publishable and unpublishable items will result in confusion and loneliness.
Steps to fix:
- If the _blocks folder is publishable, edit it, go to the "Configure" tab and uncheck the box that makes it publishable.
- Unpublish the folder
- Move any items within that folder that you want published to another folder. It is an image, consider moving it to an _images folder, or if it is a file like a pdf or Word doc, consider moving it to a _files folder
- You may keep all "blocks" in the _blocks folder, since they are in the correct place! In step 3 of this documentation you can see the difference between the icons of various types of files. The index_content file is a block in that example.
Explanation: Often it is easiest to just say "click here" when adding a link, however this has the following issues:
- It is not considered to be professional
- It is not a usability best-practice (people must then backtrack to see what they are clicking on)
- It is not AAA-compliant for accessibility
The email you received will look something like this:
has a link to /your-website/about.shtml which has a non-descriptive "here" linkSteps to fix:
- Click on the page link to open that page in a browser
- Search for the word "here" on the page, and mouse-over any links that match the link specified in the email (in the example it is "/your-website/about.shtml")
- Specify a more descriptive link. For example:
- Instead of "Click here for more information about pizza", you could say "Learn more about pizza"
Explanation: Sometimes a link is added to a page and you forget to specify where the link is going to. When ends up happening is that a web visitor will click the link and it will refresh the page exactly where they were. This is confusing for the visitor, and is also an accessibility violation. Urls should always be defined for every link.
Steps to fix:
- Your email will say something like:
- https://www.jmu.edu/yourwebsite/index.shtml has an empty link with link text "About Us"
- Go to the page in question and look for the text (in this example "About Us") and find the link in question. If you mouseover the link and it shows the exact same page that you are on, or if you click it and it goes to the same page you are on, that's the one!
- Edit the content and specify a url for the link to go to. If no url is available yet, remove the link.
Explanation: Sometimes people will copy and paste links from emails straight into Cascade webpages, not knowing they are copying a url to a safelink system. In the past we have used several safelink providers such as urldefense.com, urldefense.proofpoint.com, and safelinks.protection.outlook.com
Since we may use a different safelink provider in the future, we do not want to have old safelinks on our website, which would break. Also, having links to other domains hurt our SEO by reducing our internal links.
Steps to fix:
- Your email will contain a link to the page that has the issue
- Click on that link to go to the page in question.
- Then the line after that will be the html source that has the safelink. Try to look through the html to find the link text (if you need help, reply to the email and we can help)
- On the page in question, find that link, and confirm it's a safelink by mousing over it and seeing that it goes to a safelink service. Click on that safelink!
- When the page loads after clicking the link, copy that link in your browser location bar. That's the REAL link without the safelink stuff.
- Go to the page that had the safelink.
- Find the link text (or image) on the page.
- Edit the link to be the fully-resolved link you copied in the step above. If you have the ability to make it an INTERNAL link, please do so, or you will get another email from us saying that it will need to be converted to an internal link :)
- Publish the page
- Verify the fix.
Explanation: Sometimes default values of fields are "PLEASE SPECIFY" and when they aren't changed, they will show up on the page, which needs to be fixed right away.
Steps to Fix:
- Find the place on the page where "PLEASE SPECIFY" is showing, and change it to whatever is appropriate for the page.
Explanation: sometimes a page will come with default text, which needs to be replaced with your own text.
Steps to fix:
- Replace the 'This is a secondary page' text with your own content.
Explanation: Page titles are important for maintaining good website SEO and certain pages can benefit from having similar prefixes to their titles, such as Talent Development workshops, Alternative Breaks, and others.
Steps to fix:
- You received an email with a subject line such as Title should have 'XYZ:' prefix except your email will have something specific in there, not "XYZ"
- Simply add the prefix (with colon and space after the colon) before your current page Title's field (you don't have to worry about the Display Name field)
- Publish the page!
Explanation: Embedding videos manually into HTML causes several problems:
- It requires knowledge of HTML
- There are many ways to embed videos, resulting in inconsistent display, especially on mobile screens
- It will not have any of the features of our multi-block video option
- It will not be monitored for Title II accessibility issues
Steps to fix:
- Click on the link in your email and find the video in question. We do not support embedded videos in FAQs since it is a WYSIWYG and there is no video option, so if the video appears within a FAQ answer, please link to the video with text like "Watch Video."
- Open the video in the provider's website.
- For Youtube videos there should be a "Watch on Youtube" link to click. Copy the url of the video (which should look something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abc123 - do not include anything after the initial video ID, so if the link looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abc123&t=3 you will only want to copy the bolded portion, not the ampersand and anything after that)
- For Vimeo videos, click the "vimeo" link in the lower right corner. Copy the url of the video from your location bar (which should look something like https://vimeo.com/123456 - do not include anything after the initial video ID, so if the link looks like this: https://vimeo.com/123456?fl=pl&fe=vl you will only want to copy the bolded portion, not the question mark or anything after that)
- Edit the page in Cascade, create a new multi-block if necessary (or if the page has no multi-blocks wired to it, ask digitalmarketing@jmu.edu to convert the page to a built-in multi-block page so no multi-block needs to be created!), or add the video to an existing multi-block.
- Follow the directions for adding a multi-block video
