It's been a very busy week and I've scarcely had time to catch up on email and blog reading and other critically important activities. I spent almost the entire week deep in
Roller 3.0 development. Here's a quick update on our work.
Things are looking really good in Roller 3.0 and I'm really happy with the refactoring work we've done in the blog/feed rendering system. Our charter for 3.0 was to completely rework Roller's
URL structure and to introduce the concept of a
site-wide frontpage blog, but doing that work required a lot of refactoring -- a lot of ripping out crufty old and patched-up code with clean and shiny new abstractions. The results look
great.
Thanks to
Allen's new URL work, the rendering system is now pluggable, the caching system is easier to understand and maintain, we're approaching a point where we'll be able to offer the option of static rendering and, of course, the URL structure is
much nicer, more conventional, logical and able to handle multi-language blogs.
As part of the new frontpage blog work, we introduced some new page models an macros to make it easy to display site and planet-wide blog community information, including a user and blog directory. But we didn't stop there -- we've implemented a completely new set of models and macros for
all blogs and we hope to deprecate all of the old macos and old themes. We'll still support them, of course, but moving forward we believe the new macros will make it much easier for bloggers and theme authors to build a library of great themes -- something that Roller is missing.
We've been working hard this week because we're really supposed to be done by now, but I've got no regrets. We set some aggressive goals and, like I said, the results look great. Now we need to quicky stabilize things, get a test build together and get some feedback from the community and especially from theme authors.