Marmox Improves Page Management

Today, with the release of Marmox™ 0.2.4, Marmox gains significant XHTML page management capabilities. Marmox is nearing the point where it can be used for day-to-day management of XHTML pages and folders, all under revision control. The Marmox history page is part of the official Marmox documentation site, which is managed completely by Marmox itself and backed by Subversion. In addition, Marmox now adds easy management of useful XHTML page folders.

Creating a folder in Marmox is easy: just log in and use Resource|New|Folder. Creating a new XHTML page is just as easy: select Resource|New|Page. You'll notice that the page automatically contains a heading reflecting the title you chose (which you can change by clicking on the title or by selecting Resource|Properties). The page also contains a side menu which is updated with each page or folder you add, and the labels update when you change the titles of corresponding resources. This layout is part of a default template; eventually Marmox will allow editing of this template so that users can specify customized layouts for all or part of a site.

To edit a page, select Resource|Edit and the WYSIWYG XHTML editor will appear. Select Resource|Edit again and it goes away, saving the content in an XHTML resource. Only the XHTML content is saved—the heading and menu are part of the template which is 'wrapped" around the content.

Creation of folders and pages is straightforward. But what if you want to create a folder (such as doc/) that not only contains other resources but also displays some page content when you visit the folder? Traditional web management systems use a clunky system of default pages (e.g. index.html) that get substituted in when you browse to the folder. For example, many sites will allow you to go either to doc/ or to doc/index.html to get to the same page, but the "real" page is doc/index.html. Not only is this aesthetically unappealing, it results in redundant resource URIs and scatters multiple paths to the same resource throughout search engines.

Marmox takes a more powerful and elegant approach. The Marmot repositories behind Marmox allow collections (the technical name for folders) to have content just like any other resource. This means that the folder doc/ can have an XHTML content type and store an XHTML page in addition to containing child resources folders normally do. There is no user-visible phony doc/index.xhtml resource.

Creating a folder with XHTML content, which Marmox calls a page folder, is no harder than creating a page or a folder: just select Resource|New|Page Folder. A folder will be created the XHTML content of which you can edit just like any other page. You can see an example of a page folder on the Marmox site itself: the Marmox documentation folder.