• Images in the image library can be tagged with public tags and keywords.
• A new type of 'Article category' is available: 'Photostream'.
• The photostream can be placed anywhere in the public navigation bar.
• All images with public tags appear in the photostream, ordered by date and by ID.
• On the right side of the photostream the stream can be filtered by public tags
• The stream provides endless scrolling up to 600 thumbnails (140px * 140px), then a link to the next page appears
• Each image provides a title, a caption, a description (based on the HTML editor) and keywords.

On the Tiny Marbles CMS website you can check out the photostream. In this particular example the stream only provides 35 images, so the endless scrolling doesn't appear, and the fullsize mode only shows the screen shots, so maybe for a big monitor the fullsize screen will not fill out the complete screen.

Another working example of the photostream with endless scrolling and 'real' fullsize mode you can find on my photoblog.

Next release will probably be published end of July 2012. The new release will come with a new article type: 'Extended article', and a new layout theme called 'Flexible layout 2'. And of course with some improvements and bug fixing.

- Stay tuned -

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.

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

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") />

All these modules are combined in a logical order, the dependencies you can see in the component model in the drawing on the left. The website manager (WSM) has included all modules, and it is called 'Tiny Marbles CMS'. On the other hand, all modules can be used independently. You are looking for an authorization engine for your project: you could use Talos for that. You need a user management system? In this case you could try out MUM. Or check out the Repository in case you would like to organize your database access upon the DAO pattern and Hibernate. If you like to care about the website layout yourself, you could use the CMS module without the website manager (WSM).

The complete set of modules from the view point of a developer for independent usage is called the 'Tiny Marbles Framework'. The framework is solid, well tested and is used in a variety of running public web applications.

• New article layout: 'Blog'
• New comment feature for layout 'Blog'
• Sanitize untrusted HTML to prevent XSS
• User management: new field 'email' in class 'User' for notification of the author of an article
• RSS feed => specification of external RSS feed manager, using absolute URLs for images in an article
• Image cropper: preview feature for image cropping
  
• Banner: cross fader for the scheme 'flexible layout' available
  

Above you see the new feature 'comments' which is available with the new layout 'Blog'.

Now it is possible to upload documents, like PDF, Excel, PowerPoint and ZIP-files. With the help of document manager it is possible to manage the documents, and the files can be added to an article in the same way an image, MP3-file or video is added. The document appears in the article as a download link with a specific icon.

Check out the new article search feature:

It is now possible to distinguish properly between 'my articles' and 'all articles' with an owner of an article and an author for the related article versions. We improved the developer guide section of the online documentation. The complete permission mapping was tested and we created for a better understanding permission tables based on Excel with all related permission mappings. And of course: quality assurance with test and bug fixing.

In the release 2.1 we fixed some bugs and now the banner managment is ready to use. With the new advertising tool you can manage complete promotion areas of your website. You can add logos, banners or images, add a description and a headline and specify a URL to the website of the companies. The clicks on the banner are counted and shown in the administration area of Tiny Marbles CMS. It is very simple to use: create a new advertising area, add one or more banners and connect the area to an article category.