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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.

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.

TBD: screenshot of new design tab

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.

TBD: screenshot of stylesheet editor page

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.

TBD: screenshot of weblog settings page with new fields

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.

TBD: screenshot of templates page with new action combo

Template editor enhancements ROL-1451 For those using Roller templates to 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).

TBD: screenshot of template page editor

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 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).

  • Struts 2 migration - We have completely migrated to Struts2. ROL-1439
  • New JPA based backend - OpenJPA backend is now the default, Hibernate still present until JPA is tested sufficiently ROL-1447

Syndication improvements

Other small improvements and bug fixes

  • 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)
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