Blogging Roller

UPDATE: Roller 0.9.6 looks good and FreeRoller.net is up and running with it.

I'm happy to announce the release of The Roller Weblogger Version 0.9.6. This release adds better support for multi-user sites like FreeRoller, lots of weblog editing enhancements, new macros, valid RSS 2.0 output, and support for creating pages that validate as HTML 4 or XHTML1. Also, lots of bugs were fixed. Thanks to committers Lance Lavandowska (LL) and Matt Raible (MR). Thanks to all the folks who participated on the devlist, reported bugs, as well as those who made suggestions and complaints regarding Roller. Special thanks go to my darling wife who puts up with all of this nonsense.

You can download Roller 0.9.6 at SourceForge (thanks VA Software!). Make your contribution to Roller by reporting any problems that you find to Roller's JIRA issue tracker (thanks Atlassian!).

Summary of new features:

   Multi-user :    
   - Admin UI for deleting users (LL)
   - New start page with sortable table of all weblogs on the site (LL)
   - Referer ranking table, page and RSS hit counter in Editor UI (DJ)
   - Plugin authenticator (DJ)
   
   Weblog editing enhancements:
   - Option to save weblog entries without publishing them (LL)
   - Better control over weblog entry publish date (LL)
   - Supports creation of websites that validate as HTML4 or XHTML1 (MR)
   - Ekit HTML editor applet is available as an option to users (DJ)
   - Mitchell's DHTML editor now available as an option to IE users (LL)
   
   New and improved macros:
   - Referer ranking macro with page and RSS hit counter (DJ)
   - Big Calendar macro shows month-view with entries for each day (DJ)
   - Control over number of weblog entries displayed (DJ)
   - Protection from recursion in includePage and showWeblogEntries (DJ)
   - Expand/collapse feature in Bookmark and Newsfeed macros (MR)
   
   RSS related features:
   - Syndicator now outputs RSS 2.0 (DJ)
   - Multiple RSS feeds for each weblog, one for each category (DJ)
   - RSS feeds available with full-text or excerpts only (DJ)
   - RSS aggregation features may now be disabled (DJ)

Neil Eyde has released a new version of PersonalBlog, his Struts/Tiles implementation of Russell Beattie's MiniBlog. It also includes the Mitchell HTML editor.

Now I'm testing the Ekit editor. Looks good! This time I'll comment on Russell's comment about the "whiny biatches out there in blogland" who complain about Jakarta.  Right on Russell!  I totally agree.  The good stuff produced by Apache and Jakarta far outweighs the bad.  Every big organization is going to have politics and a jackass or two, that's just human nature.

I'm testing Mitchell's IE-only WYSIWYG HTML editor.  Anthony Eden reported a bug, I fixed it, and now you are reading the test data.  While I'm here I'm comment on The Server Side's new RSS feeds: it's about time!  I'm not going to complain that they do not validate because the RSS validator just came online today and because I'm just happy to have more RSS feeds.  Now it is your turn Cafe au Lait: give us some feeds and give us some permalinks!  Please?

This is a brand new RSS validator, built from the ground up to support all versions of RSS (but optimized for RSS 2.0). Previous efforts (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0) were either not comprehensive, or not user-friendly; this validator attempts to be both. The interactive web front end is available now; XML-RPC, SOAP, and XML-over-HTTP interfaces are coming. Concept, web design, and 300 test cases by me. Coding by Sam Ruby. And of course it's open source.[diveintomark.org]