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This is my Roller's quarterly board report for November 2008. It covers community health, status of our most recent release, work that has been done in the trunk and plans for new work. Most of this report is the same as the last status report, but there is some new material in

Community health

(Unchanged since last report) Development activity still relatively slow due to committers working on other projects and the fact that Roller 4.0 is stable and works well as is. User support questions are coming in at a steady clip and the mailing list is responding to them adequately.

Status of Apache Roller 4.0

(Unchanged since last report) Roller 4.0 is the best available release of Roller. We have made enough bug fixes in the 4.0 code base to justify a 4.0.1 release, users have tested snapshot builds and we should wrap things up and make a final 4.0.1 release as soon as possible.

Status of work in the trunk

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• We added a new fully pluggable user management system and better support for contributed by Dave Johnson working on Sun's social software for Glassfish efforts.
• Our Google Summer of Code student has completed OpenID support, using Spring Security to do. We are currently evaluating the final patch.
• Dave Johnson started working on upgrading from OpenJPA 0.9.7 to OpenJPA 1.0 but ran in to problems and has committed none of this work.
• Allen Gilliland contributed his most recent code for Apache Roller Planet, from his work on planets.sun.com. This is a separate application from the Apache Roller Weblogger and has not yet been released.

Plans for new work in the trunk

Two San Jose State University students, Ganesh Mathrubootham and Tanuja Varkanthe, are working on a two-semester project to improve Roller's Media Blogging features. This includes better management of media files images, video and audio files, new user interfaces for browsing and selecting media files and more. They've been doing extensive work on the Roller wiki to create a proposal and detailed design for this work, which you can find here: Proposal Media Blogging Support. Just last week we created a branch for the development of these new features, which will eventually (we hope) find their way in to the trunk.

Status of Apache Roller 4.0

(Unchanged since last report) Roller 4.0 is the best available release of Roller. We have made enough bug fixes in the 4.0 code base to justify a 4.0.1 release, users have tested snapshot builds and we should wrap things up and make a final 4.0.1 release as soon as possible.

Community health

(Unchanged since last report) Development activity still relatively slow due to committers working on other projects and the fact that Roller 4.0 is stable and works well as is. User support questions are coming in at a steady clip and the mailing list is responding to them adequately.

Promoting the project

Dave Johnson spoke on the topic of Roller at the Open Source Days conference in Copenhagen, Denmark on October 4, 2008. He covered this history of the project, current status and his thoughts about the future of the project.