What's new in the Roller 4.0 release

See the What's New in Roller 4.0 page for a user-oriented overview of what's new in Roller 4.0.

And take note of these important changes:

• Roller now requires Java SE 5 and will no longer run on Java SE 1.4.2.
• Roller themes must be upgraded before they will run on Roller 4.0
  • Themes must now include a theme.xml definition file
  • See Dave Johnson's "How to create a Roller 4.0 theme" posts (part1 and part2) for more information.

Known problems

Below are some known problems with Roller 4.0 (each verified by a Roller committer), that you should be aware of. You can also find bugs reported against 4.0 in our JIRA issue tracker.

• If you're deploying Roller on Geronimo or JBoss, and you're using roller-custom.properties to configure your database, you'll need to comment out the <resource-ref> elements at the bottom of Roller's web.xml file.

• If you want to use Roller's Planet aggregator feature, then refer to the Installation Guide section 9, page 14. Due to some problems (see ROL-1664) in the Planet configuration and documentation, you'll also want to pay attention to these additional steps:
  • Create a planet-custom.properties file to contain the Planet configuration properties. You must include these things in the properties file:
    • The same database properties that you included in your roller-custom.properties.
    • Set the 'cache.dir' property to point to your Planet Cache directory.
  • In STEP 2, the correct name for the task is RefreshRollerPlanetTask.
  • Since we put the PlanetModel in the 'rendering.siteModels' list, Planet will only work in the Front Page blog of the website and the front-page blog must by setup as an "aggregated site-wide front page." See the Server Admin->Configuration page to set this up.