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.
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.
Bio blurp and mugshot image
Templates by action
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).