Blogging Roller

Last week I demoed Roller 2.0 to the blogs.sun.com team. The concensus seemed to be that the group blogging UI is too "documentation light" -- meaning that we don't explain well enough the implication of creating additional blogs and of adding additional users to existing blogs. Another important point that came up is that group blogging should be optional, because some sites might want to opt-out a keep Roller running as is: one user per blog and one blog per user.

So I spent most of the rest of the week improving the UI, adding better titles and prompts and in-line documentation. I also made the group blogging features completely optional via startup property groupblogging.enabled. After that, I started working on "landing" Roller 2.0 -- that is, merging all of the 1.X changes that have been happening in the trunk up and into the Roller 2.0 development branch. I'm almost done with that and hope to commit my changes today.

For the demo last week, we used VNC. I was't aware that VNC allowed multiple users to sign-into the same session, had a built-in web server and Java applet viewer, and had a read-only mode for giving presentations over the web. It worked *really* well. Who needs costly WebEx or LiveMeeting when free VNC can do all this? We did have some initial problems getting all of the meeting attendees signed in to VNC, but in the end it worked and I seem to remember similar problems with both of the costly options.

So... this week, my goals are to polish up Roller 2.0, fix as many bugs as possible in both the Roller 1.X and Roller 2.0 branches and get more feedback by creating a standalone demo of Roller 2.0 or a screencast or both.