THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION - JUNE 14, 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.
Easy customization
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. As you can see below, we now have a design tab that includes all theme/template functionality and we've improved the theme chooser to better explain shared and custom themes.
http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/download/attachments/57403/designtab.png
Now let's cover the specifics.
Style-sheet overrides ROL-1368 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.
http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/download/attachments/57403/customcss.png
About this blog message and blog image ROL-1366 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.
http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/download/attachments/57403/weblogsettings.png
Templates by action ROL-1310 If you want to have different content on your blog's entry page, search page or tags-index you no longer need special logic to test which page you are on. Instead you can add a page to be associated with each action and we support actions permalink, tags-index, search or custom.
http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/download/attachments/57403/actiontemplates.png
Template editor enhancements ROL-1451 For those using Roller templates to define custom pages that generate XML and JSON and other content type, we've added a content-type setting to the template editor page. We've also added a language setting for Roller installations who wish to plug in their own view technologies (i.e. to use a template language other than Velocity).
http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/download/attachments/57403/templateeditor.png
Easy install
Roller's install process has always been a sore point so in 4.0 we've done the work to make installation really easy ROL-1448. Assuming you have already setup Java and your Servlet container, all you have to do to setup Roller is to create one small settings and deploy the Roller WAR. There's no need to setup a JNDI data-source or mail-session (unless you want to) and there's no need to create tables. And there's no need to download Hibernate separately because Roller no longer needs Hibernate.
On startup Roller will test your database connection and give you detailed error messages if it fails, then Roller will automatically setup tables for you and you'll be up and running in minutes.
Infrastructure upgrades
In Roller 4.0 we've upgraded the foundations upon which Roller is built. Roller now requires Java SE 5, now uses Struts2 ROL-1439 instead of Struts1 and now includes a new JPA-based back-end implementation that completely replaces HibernateROL-1447.
Other small improvements and bug fixes
There are also numerous small fixes and improvements in Roller 4.0, here are the more significant of them:
- 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)