Blogging Roller

James Snell brings news of an Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) interop event to occur in March at the O'Reilly E-Tech conference. I'd love to use that as an excuse to go to to E-Tech, since my current work involves APP in ROME and Roller, but it sounds like I can participate remotely.

Over the weekend I convinced my Dad to start a blog and I offered to host it on my site with Roller (of course). We've already started to set the site up. Dad picked up a nice short domain name, I added it to the kattare.com name servers (Kattare is my ISP) and I added support for the new domains to my Apache/Tomcat setup there.

Now I have to to figure out how to host multiple domains with Roller. That's a topic that has come up before.

A while back LinPro Norway developed a multi-site capability for Roller. I called it multi-domain at the time, but now I think that was wrong. As I understand it, multi-site allows one Roller database to serve multiple Roller sites. Each site having it's own Server Admin settings and serving one or more domains. Mutli-site requires significant changes because the each table must have an additional field that indicate which site it belongs to. Unfortunately, the patches were too extensive for us to incorporate into Roller.

What I'm doing now is multi-domain, which appears to be much easier. I'm not sure multi-site and multi-domain are accepted terminology, so I'll explain. I want one Roller database to serve multiple domains, but with all domains sharing the same Server Admin settings. It's definitely going to require some code changes, but with the new 3.0 rendering system, I'm finding that those are pretty easy to do. In fact, I've already got some working code ready to deploy. Once I get it deployed and working, I'll write up a proposal and see if I can get simple multi-domain support into the Roller codebase.