Blogging Roller

As I have said before: here's to the complainers. Those who care enough to complain are an important asset to any software product. Hani is the king of whiny-ass complainers, of course. He can't do anything except complain, that is the charter of his blog after all and he is locked into his own stinky little cage, but I do still appreciate the constructive criticism that he makes in his recent weblog entry about Roller. Here are the improvements that he suggested, minus the childish and poorly written bile:

• Editor UI: add a dismiss button to the popup calendar
• Editor UI: document plugins in Roller user guide
• Editor UI: provide comment count
• Editor UI: the allow comments on entry flag should default to true (fixed)
• Weblog search: add paging for lengthy search results
• Weblog search: problem with search results?
• Main page: Font sizes too large on main page (fixed)
• Main page: List weblog name rather than user name in hot blogs list (fixed)
• Main page: Provide option to view main page with out excerpts
• Edit user page: default locale to en and timezone to America/New_York (fixed)

We will be deploying new Roller 0.9.9 builds to JRoller over the next couple of weeks and we may have the opportunity to make some of these improvements, but these are not the only problems we are tracking and the all-volunteer Roller development team has limited time to commit to Roller. If you really want to make Roller better, it's up to you. Roller is open source software and you can help to make it better by filing bug reports and suggestions to Roller's JIRA issue tracker, by submitting patches, and by helping out with documentation on the Roller Wiki.

Roller is the most popular and successful weblogging software among Java bloggers, was recently chosen by Sun to power blogs.sun.com, and is enjoyed by thousands of webloggers worldwide. Join us, help to ensure Roller's continued success, and make a difference in the open source Java community.

Wiki syntax seems to be working just fine in Roller 0.9.9 as demonstrated by this fine quality Wiki-Blog post.

I'm not sure why your _entry page template is not working, Matt. Perhaps one of the macros you are using has a different call signature than it did in 0.9.8?

The good news is that, with Lance's improvements to the plugin pipeline, you no longer need that _entry page template to enable Wiki syntax. If you have the Wiki plugin listed in your web.xml and you have the Wiki Syntax checkbox checked on your Website:Settings page then you will see a Wiki Syntax checkbox in the Weblog Edit page. You can enable Wiki Syntax on a per Weblog entry basis by setting that checkbox.

By the way, Wiki support is not enabled on JRoller.com because there is no Wiki on JRoller.com.