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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.

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Easy customization

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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.

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TBD: screenshot of template page editor

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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. 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. 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. See also ROL-1448.

Infrastructure

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upgrades

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).

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