Blogging Roller

Robert Sayre: "Six Apart's recent acquisition of LiveJournal means goodness for Atom format and protocol clients. Together with Blogger, this should push things to critical mass."

Oh, and I forgot to mention Atom Protocol support (ROL-605) in my list of possible post-1.0 Roller features (it is almost complete now, BTW).

Now that we're getting down to the last couple of bugs, it's time to think about what comes after Roller 1.0. I've been reviewing the bug database and making sure all the things folks have been asking for are in there as bugs, new features, or improvements. I've put together a list of the new feature areas that I personally think are most interesting with links into our JIRA issue tracker.

I'm posting this to get feedback from anybody and everybody willing to give it, but this is not a democratic process. My manager will ultimately determine what I work on (since the book eats all of my so called free time) and the other Roller developers will decide what they each want to work on. But we'd all like to hear what you, the Roller users and fans and victims (like Charles at Javablogs.com) have to say. You can respond here, on your blogs, in the issue tracking system (as votes or comments), or on the Roller mailing lists.

Group blogging

Group blogging is a long requested feature. We've always known that eventually, each user would have more than one blog and each blog could have more than one user (ROL-598). We've also discussed the idea of a simple workflow, where only designated "editors" in a group blog can post and regular authors can only save drafts (ROL-599).

Better front page / community area

Better front page and community features are also much requested. We need better ways to explore the blogs on a Roller server, better reports, and some way to browse users. Right now, you can only see who posted recently and the top 40 blogs for the day, based on hit counts (ROL-561). Rick Ross has suggested adding a language field for each weblog entry, so that visitors can switch between the all languages front page to view only French entries, only Spanish, or whatever they prefer (ROL-423). We've also discussed the idea of adding a community aggregator to the front page (ROL-596).

Category improvements

We need to complete support for hierarchical categories (ROL-511) and allow multiple categories per blog entry (ROL-58). Also, to better support new front page views and corporate blogging, we should consider having an option for a shared category tree (ROL-606) instead of allowing each user to have his/her own category scheme.

Better comment management

We've come a long way with comment spam protection in Roller 1.0, but have a ways to go. We have both CAPTCHA and simple math-question comment authenticators, but we could use some others. And we need better ways to manage, edit, and even bulk delete comments (ROL-563).

Better plugin support

We have plugins now -- such as the read-more, wiki, and others -- but they could do so much more. We have discussed a proposal to expand plugin support to allow plugins to add arbitrary metadata to blog entries and to allow plugins to hook into the weblog editor (ROL-601). Such a plugin would make it very easy to add support for Podcasting (ROL-597).

Better URLs and GUIDs

Tim Bray commented on Roller's "lame" perma-links, which need fixing (ROL-594). Also, Roller permalinks include the publication dates which can be changed so they don't really make good GUIDs -- we should fix that as well (ROL-595). We'd better fix those are the same time too, so that Charles at Javablogs.com doesn't have to endure multiple floods of new JRoller and blogs.sun.com entries.

Administrative Improvements

Changes are also needed to help support Roller administrators. For example, a Roller admin should have a super-user capability so that they can view, edit, and delete any blog entry or comment in the system. (ROL-600). To ease the pain of Roller installs, we need a real installer (we've discussed this on mailing list and IRC, but there is no JIRA issue). And poor old bug #9  which calls for a forgot-my-password page, has been ignored for far too long.

That's all I have for you tonight. Now it's your turn. What features do you think Roller needs most?

That looks very cool.

Turns out, one of the "other analysts" that Michael Signer spoke of was a blogger named James Governor. In the comments to my previous post, James writes:

"actually it was me. i got a quick email from Michael and gave him a rapid response. its pretty harsh to accuse him of making the idea up if he attributed it to an analyst. Basically i felt that you are doing good work with Roller, and engaging with Sun customers, but that Sun itself has said basically not much about the future of the product at all. Michael had heard a sniff of an open source splash and is looking for ideas. i have not got the inside skinny, but i could easily imagine Sun "packaging" the Roller and open source news, or changing the license. or something. Either that or open sourcing some other JES componentry. Feel free to set the record straight. What are Sun's plans for Roller?"

James, I assumed that he was making things up because he was so far off base. How could he not know that Roller is already open source? Development is done on a public CVS server, issue tracking is public, and discussions happen on public mailing lists, blogs, and the Roller wiki.

James asks that I "set the record straight" and "what are Sun's plans for Roller?" I'm not going to discuss Sun's future product plans or announcements, but my personal plan is to make Roller the best possible platform for blogging, collaboration, and community building. If you want to know how that plan is going, watch me work.