Blogging Roller

More of the same news this week as work continues on Roller 4.0, testing and bug fixing. Allen made some comment formatting related changes and introduced what I hope is the last database schema modification we'll make in 4.0. Davis Nguyen is testing and finding problem, some of which may be caused by bugs in the new JPA back-end so I'll have more debugging work this week.

As you can see from the road roller graphic on the right, we're making progress with 4.0. We've gone from a wobbly pen and colored pencil drawing to a snazzy Gimp-powered image with gradients and drop-shadows.

Looking forward to getting started with post-4.0 work, I started two new 4.1 proposals to externalize <a href= "http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/Proposal+Externalize+User+Management">user management and <a href= "http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/Proposal+Externalize+User+Permissions">permssions to make it easier to hook Roller into directory servers and permissions systems.

In other news, the Roller 3.1.1 RC1 release has been out for a about a week now. We haven't gotten much feedback on it yet, but we have been getting some feedback on Roller 3.1 in general from Websphere and Weblogic users as they're having problems getting Roller up and running. If you work for IBM/Websphere or BEA/Weblogic you might want to stop by and help us figure out what's going wrong, maybe there's something we can fix in 3.1.1 to getting Roller running better on your platforms.

Also on the 3.1 front, Matt Schmidt is working on upgrading JRoller.com to Roller 3.1 and has plans to move to 4.0 after that. Roller 3.1 will bring better performance/stability and new features to the DZone network's Java blogging site.

That's it for this weeks episode. Please tune in next week for more...

Quick links to previous episodes: #6, #5, #4, #3, #2 and #1.