Modernizing the Roller UI

Dave Johnson — Sat, 11 Jun 2016 18:28:36 +0000

I don't blog very often but I still find time to work on my blog's software: Apache Roller.

Recently, I decided to focus on improving Roller's ancient Struts 2-based user interface (UI). I had considered adding a comprehensive API to Roller and building a new UI based on that API, but wow that is a huge amount of work. Instead, I decided to modernize the Roller UI by using Twitter's Bootstrap components and CSS styles.

So far, I've devoted a couple of weekends to this work and made some pretty good progress. I'm about half-way done. I'm using the Struts2-Bootstrap plugin, adding better client-side form validation with JavaScript and doing my best to improve the overall user experience. You can see an album of the pages I've done so far on Flickr:
Roller UI with Bootstrap.

I would love any contributions, so if you are interested in helping out, please submit Pull Requests against the bootstrap-ui branch in the Apache Roller repo on GitHub.

New Bootstrap based theme

Dave Johnson — Sun, 19 Jan 2014 21:10:01 +0000

I'm not motivated to write new blog entries but for some reason I was motivated to update my blog's theme. This time I decided to go with Twitter Bootstrap + jQuery. It's responsive, so to speak. What do you think? I think it takes a little too long for the banner image to load.

Blogging Roller

Modernizing the Roller UI

New Bootstrap based theme