Blogging Roller

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 Ironically, the Roller modernization project leaves Roller three years out of date.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 in Roller's deployment/docker-compose directory. And you can find a Docker image in my DockerHub repo.

docker-compose up

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.