What's new in Roller 5.0

Roller 5.0 has been in the works for a long time and even before Roller 4.0 was released. Roller 5.0 is the result of contributions from Sun Microsystems social software efforts, San Jose State Univ. student developers, a Google Summer of Code project and volunteer work of ASF Roller project committers and other contributors.

The ApacheCon US 2009 presentation What's new in Roller 5.0 tells the story of Roller and Roller 5.0 in some detail and includes details on the new features, which are summarized here.

Media Blogging features

The main new feature in Roller 5.0 is "media blogging" which is what we call a set of features that are designed to make it easier for you to upload, manage and blog images, video files and audio files – media files. With Roller 5, when you upload files you can add title information, tags and Roller will automatically generate a thumbnail for your image.

Below you can see the new media file management page, showing a thumbnail for each media file:

And below you can see the new media file upload page and the metadata you can now specify per upload:

Editing of comments

Simple multi-domain support

One Roller instance serves multiple domains
e.g. my site at rollerweblogger.org serves four domains via the configuration below

1. roller-custom.properties
   weblog.absoluteurl.photophys=http://photophys.com
   weblog.absoluteurl.alex=http://greenimp.me
   weblog.absoluteurl.linus=http://linusjohnson.com

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ROL-1670 http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/Proposal+Simple+Multidomain+Support

Open ID support

Support for OpenID logins via Spring Security
new startup property authentication.openid
Allowed values: disabled, hybrid and only.
http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/Proposal+OpenID+Support
https://issues.apache.org/roller/browse/ROL-1733

OAuth for AtomPub

AtomPub authentication options now:
OAuth
WSSE
Basic

Improvements in code base