This is Roller's quarterly board report for February 2009. It covers community health, status of our most recent release, work that has been done in the trunk and plans for new work.

Status of work in the trunk

Below are the changes in the trunk since the last major release. In December 2008, Dave Johnson proposed that the next major release of Roller include these changes, enchanced Media Blogging, cluster-friendly search and upgrades to the latest Struts and OpenJPA releases. His proposal is here: Apache Roller 5.0 Release.

  • 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 (SJSU) 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.

We created a branch for the development of these new features and In late December 2008, Ganesh submitted and we accepted a patch that includes new manager interfaces, POJOs, Struts actions and JSPs that form the foundation for the Media Blogging work.

Status of Apache Roller 4.0

After learning of a security vulnerability in our 4.0 release, decided it was time to make a release to include a fix for the security problem plus the dozens of bug fixes we've made since 4.0 was released in December 2007. The release announcement is here http://markmail.org/message/zf3o5kx6omd3mhrv.

Community health

The community is doing well, but our committers are definitely not as active as they were in the past and we need some new blood. We nominated and voted in a new committer Ganesh Mathrubootham and there are several other community members that may develop into new committers.

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