It was long overdue. Finally Tiny Marbles CMS 2.7 supports SEO friendly URLs in the public area. Creating a SEO and human friendly URL is essential, a dirty looking URL with a bunch of parameter doesn't work properly with most of the web crawlers. In previous releases of Tiny Marbles CMS a complicate URL looked like that:

http://domain/wsm/html/listshort.action?channel=componentmodel&request_locale=en

The optimized URL for search engines since the release 2.7:

http://domain/development/component-model/

In order to support SEO friendly URLs the article management was refactored. Each article category now has an URL-token which is generated automatically from the system to create the optimized URL. The URL token can be changed by the user if necessary. The same applies to the article: here the title is used for the URL token.

Deploy Tiny Marbles as 'Root'
In the past it was not possible to deploy Tiny Marbles CMS directly as 'Root' in TomCat because of a bug. However it was possible in older releases to avoid the servlet context 'wsm' in the URL using the vhost configuration in Apache. With the new release 2.7 the system is configured for the direct usage as 'Root'. If you still would like to use the servlet context you have to configure your vhost configuration to support the installation in case you have more than one deployment on your TomCat.

It was time for a new update of the Tiny Marbles CMS. The new release 2.6.1 provides two new features for the article category: Now it is possible to create directly a new article from a chosen article category. The advantage: the system automatically chooses the correct article type and the article category is added automatically as well. Second new feature: now it is possible to search for an article in the box 'Add article to article category'.

Furthermore the new release provides some improvements and of course bug fixes. One important improvement: what was once a nice floatable box is now a beautiful floatable box with a scrollbar. The floatable box is a draggable dialog box which can include any needed feature, mostly it is used to add article categories to an article, banner or workday, or to add a user to a group and vice versa. The problem of the old floatable box was, that in case of a large number of article categories the box was to big for the browser window. The new box now comes with a vertical scrollbar which appears automatically:

The floatable box is available as a Freemarker macro and is part of the webcore library of the Tiny Marbles Framework:

<@show.box id="boxArticle" scrollbar=true labelClose="${action.getText('label.close')}">

    ... add your content here ... if 'scrollbar' is set to 'true' the scrollbar  appears
    automatically in case the content is bigger than the box height. 
    
</@show.box

In Tiny Marbles CMS all HTML pages are created with the Java template engine FreeMarker. FreeMarker is designed to be practical for the generation of HTML Web pages, particularly by servlet-based applications following the MVC (Model View Controller) pattern, which is in case of Tiny Marbles CMS the Apache Struts framework.

Each FreeMarker template of Tiny Marbles CMS in turn calls FreeMarker macros, these macros are called 'widgets' to consistently generate user interfaces in HTML. The most important widgets are declared in the 'widget templates' of the package 'webcore' of the Tiny Marbles Framework. The FreeMarker templates in the folder /web/templates/ of package 'webcore' are devided in in three areas:

• Macros that display information are defined in the widget_webcore_show.ftl template.
• Macros whose main purpose is to allow the user to input information are defined in the widget_webcore_edit.ftl template.
• Macros that display data (mainly lists) are defined inside the widget_webcore_data.ftl template.

The approach with the FreeMarker templates and FreeMarker macros is a powerful feature of Tiny Marbles to create HTML code for administration pages as well as for public websites in a simple and intuitive way. Filtered lists, pagination, trees, tabs, image galleries or Ajax requests can be build very quickly using the widgets of the FreeMarker macro library.  

The widgets can be called with @show, @edit or @data from the following modules of the Tiny Marbles Framework: webcore, MUM, CMS and WSM. Here an example for creating a submit button for an HTML form:

<@edit.button label=action.getText("control.Zone.submit") />