Blogging Roller

I've used Ecto before with Roller (I bought a license), so I was a little surprised that Tim found a problem with it. He said that it was able to post, but it issues an error message RPC handler object "mt" not found, which indicates that perhaps Tim's Ecto is configured for Movable Type instead of plain old MetaWeblog API access.

Let's see if I can edit a post in place.

I'll post this now and then open it for editing... back in a sec.

Yep, that worked. However, something odd happened. When I opened up the post, my <p> tags were stripped out. I had to add them back in by hand. Hmmm.... an Ecto bug? But the re-post did work, in fact, when I clicked the Publish button Ecto popped up a dialog that asked "Old or New? This entry has been posted before. Should I submit a modification or create a new entry?"

Update: I was able to get Ecto to stop stripping my <p> tags by setting the "Convert line breaks in rich text mode" option.

To make it easier for folks to try Roller 1.1 and the new experimental Planet aggregator, I've created a standalone Roller demo by bundling Roller with JSPWiki, Tomcat, and the tiny pure-Java HSQLDB database. Everything is preconfigured and ready to run. All you need to do to try Roller is the following:

1. Download roller-demo-1.1.tar.gz from Java.Net (a 22MB download)

2. Unzip the file into a directory on your hard-drive 
   (directory name should have no spaces)

3. Ensure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set to point to your JDK

4. Ensure that CATALINA_HOME is NOT set in your environment

5. To start Roller, either:
   - on Windows: open the Roller bin directory and double-click on startup.bat 
   - on UNIX: cd to the Roller bin directory, chmod +x on all files, run ./startup.sh

6. Point your browser at http://localhost:8080/roller

7. Login as nina/nina, admin/admin, or register as a new user

8. Get rollin'

Read all about it on the Roller project blog: http://rollerweblogger.org.

I'll have a new build of the standalone demo version of Roller ready today so you can check out the Planet Roller aggregator (which is not included in the standard build).