Roller 6.0.0-SNAPSHOT
Upgraded this site to Roller 6.0.0-SNAPSHOT today, which meant an hour of fiddling around with my private Docker registry, then giving up and using the one free private repository offered by DockerHub and then, another hour of futzing around trying to figure out my PostgreSQL JDBC driver doesn't work anymore (I inadvertently upgraded from JDK 1.7 to 1.8) and why I can't seem to upgrade it (Kubernetes caches Docker images unless you set imagePullPolicy to always). In the end, I got it working. This post is written in the yet to be officially release Apache Roller 6.0.0-SNAPSHOT version.
Side note: the new rich-text editor in Roller is now Summernote and it seems quite nice. I need to tweak it a bit because there is currently no way to set the font or add a link unless you switch to raw HTML mode.
Roller's new web UI
About three years ago I decided to modernize and improve the Apache Roller web UI by rewriting the JSP pages to use the Struts 2 Bootstrap tags, which use Twitter's Bootstrap v3 components and JavaScipt. I also wanted to replace all the HTML table-based formatting with div's and Bootstrap, do a bunch of other improvements and make Roller's web UI less clunky and annoying.
Converting Roller's eight-five JSP pages was a big task and I did not have much time for it. That's why it took three years. Ironically, the Roller modernization project leaves Roller three years out of date. Still, I think it is a huge improvement over the Roller v5 web UI and I want to get it released in Roller v6. Currently, this work is available as Pull Request #22 and you can find some screenshots there too. Here's one:
Try it with Docker-Compose
I also did some work to make it super-easy to try the Roller v6 snapshot pre-release for yourself, by using Docker Compose. You don't have to fiddle with Tomcat or PostgreSQL. You can find a simple Dockerfile for running Roller v2 snapshot and a docker-compose.yml file linked below. And you can find a Docker image in my DockerHub repo.
If you want to try Roller v6 snapshot, here's what you need to do:1 - If you don't aleady have it, install Docker
2 - Create a directory on your computer where you want Roller to store it's data.
3 - Save this file docker-compose.yml to that new directory.
4 - Open a shell in that new directory and run:
docker-compose up
5 - Watch the PostgreSQL and Roller startup logs scroll by
6 - When the log scroll slows go to http://localhost:8080 to access Roller and go through the initial setup.
Alternatively, if you want to try Roller the hard way, you can get the regular-style v6 SNAPSHOT release files here roller/roller-6.0/v6.0.0.
Let us know how it goes
I hope you'll give Roller v6 snapshot a try and let the project know how it can be improved for your use. Send feedback to the Roller mailing lists or ttweet at us at @apache_roller.