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THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION - JUNE 13, 2007

Apache Roller 4.0 is a major new release which includes easier blog theme customization, a much more simple installation/upgrade process, infrastructure improvements and numerous other small fixes. This page provides an overview of the major features and improvements in 4.0.

Ease of customization improvements

Even if you know HTML and CSS it can be fairly difficult to customize the look and feel of your Roller-based blog. You might know what HTML and CSS need to be added or changed, but figuring out where exactly to make changes in themes can be difficult. In this release, we're addressing that problem in several ways.

First, we've rearranged the Roller user-interface and moved the theme-chooser and template editing pages to their own tab.

Style-sheet overrides To make it easy for folks to change theme colors and fonts, we've introduce the notion of a style-sheet override for each theme. Roller themes can now include a style-sheet override file and if you want to set your own colors and fonts, that's the place to add and change CSS.

The proposal for this new feature is here Proposal Stylesheet Overrides for Weblogs and the corresponding issue is here ROL-1368.

About this blog message and blog image Most blogs include a short "about this blog" message and an image, which is either a mugshot of the author or the icon/logo of the blog. So we've added new fields to the weblog settings page so you can set these for your blog and now Roller themes can include these fields in a standard way. You won't be able to take advantage of this feature unless you are using a theme that has been updated for Roller 4.0.

Here's the issue we're using to track this new feature: ROL-1366 Ease of weblog customization: custom bio blurp & thumbnail entry

Templates by action If you want to use a different layout or design on your weblog's permalink, tags or search page you can now specify which template is to be used in each case.

Simple and easy installation and upgrade process

  • Proposal Easy Install - Make the Roller installation process simple by requiring only a single simple property file for configuration and by automating creation and update of database tables required for Roller. Almost complete: auto-create and update work remains to be done. ROL-1448

Infrastructure improvements

In Roller 4.0 we're improving the infrastructure that supports Roller by upgrading to Java SE 5 and Struts2. We're upgrading to Java SE 5 because just about everybody else and we want to be able to take advantage of annotations, generics and other new language features. We're upgrading to Struts2 because UI improvements were just too difficult in Struts1, but as a team we prefer action frameworks (like Struts) over component frameworks (like JSF).

  • Struts 2 migration - We have completely migrated to Struts2. ROL-1439
  • New JPA based backend - OpenJPA backend is now the default, Hibernate still present until JPA is tested sufficiently ROL-1447

Syndication improvements

Other small improvements and bug fixes

  • ROL-1136 Enable the use of Screen Name (was 'allow user to change username')
  • ROL-1294 Task scheduling is inconsistent due to use of java.util.Timer
  • ROL-1323 Remove 'Referrers' tab for sites that don't use this functionality
  • ROL-1350 Refine trackback message...
  • ROL-1359 a small bug about bookmarks
  • ROL-1360 Notify email value $cform.notify is always false
  • ROL-1365 Filter by Search String on the Entries page
  • ROL-1371 Bad links in site-wide comment links
  • ROL-1378 Upgrade to Apache Velocity 1.5
  • ROL-1379 Upgrade to Apache XMLRPC 3.0
  • ROL-1380 Rename Atom Admin Publishing Protocol
  • ROL-1386 Keywords on blacklist still let through in comments while non blacklisted terms are trapped
  • ROL-1449 - Add support for registration via email (patch from Sedat Çiftçi)
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