Evaluating Roller

I make my living deploying J2EE technologies like Struts & Hibernate, I love my job, and the money’s not bad. Following the MT Licensing changes, I plan on helping roller and giving something back to the java community.

I make my living deploying J2EE technologies like Struts & Hibernate, I love my job, and the money’s not bad. I learned struts & hibernate by reading the sourcecode for Roller, and the associated article.

As I mentioned yesterday, I have concerns about the new MT license, and because of them, I’m evaluating other options. I’m still not committed to leaving MovableType, but after reading Dave’s recent entry and Ted’s post about the importance of community tools I’ve been thinking.

I’ve gained so much from Roller, I’m going to try and see if I can give something back, both as a user & as a developer. With this in mind, I’ve started thinking about the features of MT that I currently use, and trying to see if they’re available in Roller. If they aren’t available, then I’ll look at what’s involved in adding them. Then, if it all looks possible, I’ll start helping out.

Textile Support

I write all my entries in Textile, it’s a great way to automatically generate valid XHTML without wearing out the > key. It seems a plugin exists I’ll have to give it a try.

Individual Entry Archives

I like permalinks that point to the individual entries rather than an anchor within a larger archive. Basically, I want URLs in my Feeds to point straight at the relevant entry, with comments, trackbacks and inputs available. It facilitates discussion and helps google index a bit better.

Cruft free URLs

My URLs still aren’t perfect, I’m aiming for something like Mark has. Roller seems to use elements of the URL as a sort of query, hopefully this is flexible enough for my needs. If I switch I’ll need to manually handle the redirection from my current MT URLs, I already have a perl script to generate the mod_rewrite rules as needed. However I’m not keen on using mod_rewrite (or the servlet filter equivalent) for all the new stuff.

Hopefully I’ll be able to coax roller to using the ‘cruft free’ approach. If not, maybe mod_rewrite will be flexible enough.

Atom Support

I like Atom, both the syndication format and the API. It’s sufficiently specified to be useful, and support is growing. I can’t see any Atom feeds coming out of Roller powered blogs, any pointers? I assume that it’s pretty easy with the velocity templating mechanism.

Support for the Atom API is a ‘nice to have’, not too many tools have atom API support, and it’s something I could help implement given enough time. In the meantime, the ‘lesser’ APIs will do.

Category Specific Feeds

I don’t want to flood javablogs with entries on random stuff, handles this just fine.

Multiple Categories

I’m not desperate for this, but I do use it fairly regularly. Maybe I could help out

Linkblog support

I often need to download or read things at work, however the internet connection there is worse than at home. I need some central store of URLs and a linkblog looks good. Dave uses roller and has a linkblog, I guess I just need to do what he does.

MovableType import support

MovableType has an export Format, WordPress supports this, but roller doesn’t seem to, maybe this is the first thing I should whip up. While importing RSS or atom would be nice, I’m after something more complete.

Conclusion

So, I guess I’ll spend some time with roller over the next week or so. Assuming everything goes according to plan, I’ll start hacking as time allows.