Blogging Roller

It's been over a month since the last Roller Strong, so now I'm really glad I didn't call this thing Roller Week. Anyhow, in this installment I've got news about including new releases, a big new Roller customer and upcoming Roller-related events. I'll start with the release news.

Apache Roller 4.0 RC9 available for testing

In addition to the internal testing done by Sun's blogs.sun.com and App Platform teams, the Apache Roller community has also tested eight release candidates of Roller 4.0. That's a lot of testing and fixing, but we're still not quite done. We found enough issues in RC8 to justify yet another build, so today I spun a new one, made it available for testing and called for another release vote. Here are the files:

RC9 file are available for testing purposes here:
http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/apache-roller-4.0-rc

Ten new 4.0 themes (from rollerthemes.com) are now available here:
https://roller.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectDocumentList

"Your US government blog" powered by Roller

The US Government recently launched a blog called GovGab (http://govgab.com). It's powered by five employees of the Office of Citizen Services and Communications and Apache Roller 3.1.

The GovGab folks have been helping out with the (still ongoing) Roller 3.1.1 release by reporting bugs and suggesting fixes. I hope we'll be seeing more from them as they role out more blogs and more Roller-powered blog sites.

Roller at ApacheCon US and EU

ApacheCon US 2007 is only a couple of weeks away but there's still enough time for you to sign up and make travel arrangements for Atlanta, GA. So get on it! You don't want to miss my talk again now, do you? I'll be presenting my Roller and blogs as a web development platform, the same one I gave earlier this year at ApacheCon EU. I'll also be at the Struts/Roller BOF on Wednesday night to talk about Roller's recent migration to Struts2. BTW, Raible says there will be FREE BEER at the BOF.

In related news, I just proposed five Roller related talks for ApacheCon EU 2008. While I was submitting my proposals, I saw that Matt Raible submitted one too (on Roller w/LDAP and SSO), so it's pretty likely that somebody will be talking Roller in Amsterdam in April 2008 too.

That's all I've got for you today. See ya next time...

- Dave