Aldrich: Navigating the interface

Owned by Todd McGill
Last updated: Oct 25, 2024
3 min read

Asset tree

Located at the left of the Cascade 8 interface, the asset tree contains all the content elements you’ve added to your site.

asset tree

A new Aldrich site comes with three pre-created folders:

  • _blocks - This folder is empty and is provided as a convenient place to put widget and layout blocks. If you prefer organizing your assets differently, this folder can be safely deleted.

  • _img - Empty. Provided as a convenient place to put your images. Safe to delete if you’d rather organize differently.

  • _site - This folder contains your site-wide assets. You’re welcome to add stuff to this folder, but renaming or deleting this folder or its default contents will break your site.

    • footer - This is your site footer.

    • header - This is your site header.

    • primary-nav - This is your site’s primary navigation.

    • site-settings - This is where you configure your site settings.

    • theme-settings - This enables your site to inherit centrally-controlled css and javascript. Do not touch.

Changes made to site-wide assets can be pushed live by publishing just the asset itself. There is no need to republish the entire site.

Add Content menu

add content menu toggle

Located at the top of the Cascade 8 interface, this is where you go to create new instances of template assets.

The Add Content menu is one of the few aspects of Cascade 8 (and thus the Aldrich template) that cannot be managed centrally. As such, the menu for your site may look different than what is described here since the menu contents for new sites will change as the template evolves.

If you don’t have access to a particular menu item or can’t find what you’re looking for, reach out through ServiceNow and a Cascade admin can help reorganize and repopulate your menu.

Cascade preview and outputs

When a page is selected in the asset tree, a preview of the page will appear in the main area of the interface, but the particular type of preview will depend on which output is selected.

The currently selected output is displayed in the top right of the interface. A different output can be selected by clicking the output name.

Changing the output is unnecessary in most cases, but may be helpful when troubleshooting customizations.

block shortcuts

With this output selected, hovering over a widget or layout will cause it to ‘pop out’ and the block name will appear above that. When clicked, the block name will take you directly to the block itself. This is helpful for quickly identifying where on a page a block is placed and accessing it to make edits.

php

In cases where the block shortcuts are unhelpful, distracting, or interfere with what you’re trying to do, select the php output. This output provides a standard page preview, without block shortcuts present.

system xml

This output allows you to see the structured data of your page the way Cascade sees it.