Installing Roller - Commentary

[Henri Yandell <fl...@gmail.com>]

Some thoughts on an installing of Roller (from the latest in SVN
trunk, ie: 1.3-to-be). I'll install Roller 2.0 in a bit, so these
comments are made without knowing which features are coming in 2.0.

svn checkout, run ant, read message, run ant all. Noticec new build/
directory, took a little while to find the bit that needs to be
installed. Any reason not to delete: "compile_beans  compile_contrib 
compile_web  generated  junk  lib" after the build is complete? Or
just dump the entire build directory after moving the roller/
directory up one.

Zipped up the roller directory move to another platform; went through
the postgres dance to remember how to create a new database and after
a quick find to find the sql to run. Cat that into the db, copy the
roller.xml from my prod install to my dev install and we're away.

All pretty good so far, obviously having done it before I'm not an
ideal tester, but I don't think any of the above is hard to grasp.

Next up, registering a blog/user. Went to the roller page, bit odd.
Says 'Roller site' twice on the front.

I registered a user, zoom, all very nice. It would be good to have a
note on the first user page saying "This user will automatically be
the admin". And then it would be good to have a page after that which
the first user is forced to fill out with bits like 'Blog Server Name'
to replace the default 'Roller Site'.

Modified the Categories. I'm not sure defaults of Music General and
Java are too great a set. Might be simpler to just go with General.
Posted a quick blog entry. Logged out.

I registered another blog/user. After logging in, no admin tab; so
that worked :) Quick post; nice to see that the bug is fixed where
changing the comments timeout sends me back to the top of the page.
Probably fixed ages ago, I've been quite behind on the production
blog.

MediaCast setting needs a ? mark next to it (the popup help bit). I
doubt people will have a clue what that means. I haven't :)

There's a new link at the top called 'comments'. Needs to be
capitalized. Also needs to work, looks like it's not executing as I
get an empty page whose source contains:

-----------------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<comments xmlns="http://www.joehewitt.com/content/blog.dtd"
    entryid="$entry.Id">
</comments>
------------------------

I added a comment and it still kept doing that :)

Nothing under 'Hot Weblogs' yet. Also Search is still daft. 'sheep'
doesn't hit on 'sheepish' etc, ie: it's whole word searching. This
could explain why Carrie always complains about the search not
working. Bit more playing and I realise that * works. I never really
paid any attention to the search before.

Big fan of the "Convert Line Breaks" plugin by the way.

Blogroll. Might need to take Lance's blog off of this; his site's been
down for a bit (everything okay Lance?) and it seems poor to have a
broken link on somebody's shiny new blog.

That's all. I didn't install on top of a copy of our current database
as Carrie's blog got rather screwed up a while ago. Still, I'll give
that a try to see if I have to migrate the entries over manually or if
the new version won't have the problems that our ancient 0.9.x version
has.

Also, I need to install Roller 2.0 so we can use that instead :)

Hen

Re: Installing Roller - Commentary

[Henri Yandell <fl...@gmail.com>]

On 10/10/05, Lance Lavandowska <la...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Blogroll. Might need to take Lance's blog off of this; his site's been
> > down for a bit (everything okay Lance?) and it seems poor to have a
> > broken link on somebody's shiny new blog.
>
> I moved a while back, and since I am self-hosted that means my server
> was down in the interim (still is).  We were in temporary housing for
> a month, so I didn't get the server back up, and now I'm just
> suffering from the "new home busy" syndrome.
>
> I keep saying this, but, maybe this weekend I'll get my server connected again.

Still down ;)

Hen

Re: Installing Roller - Commentary

[Lance Lavandowska <la...@gmail.com>]

> Blogroll. Might need to take Lance's blog off of this; his site's been
> down for a bit (everything okay Lance?) and it seems poor to have a
> broken link on somebody's shiny new blog.

I moved a while back, and since I am self-hosted that means my server
was down in the interim (still is).  We were in temporary housing for
a month, so I didn't get the server back up, and now I'm just
suffering from the "new home busy" syndrome.

I keep saying this, but, maybe this weekend I'll get my server connected again.

Lance

Re: Installing Roller - Commentary

[Allen Gilliland <Al...@Sun.COM>]

On Sun, 2005-10-09 at 20:26, Henri Yandell wrote:
> On 10/9/05, Anil Gangolli <an...@busybuddha.org> wrote:
> >
> > It would have helped on the "all" target bit, and also on finding the build
> > results, but you're right that we could and probably shoul dmake "all" the
> > default target and the result location easier to guess without even reading
> > (like maybe a dist dir at top level as an end result?).
> 
> If we put it in the form of a distribution, as gets released etc, then
> dist/ would be a great name. If it's just a roller/ dir, then dist
> would be confusing as it so often expects to have a tar.gz, .zip or
> something.

I think the build process works fine the way it is, but I also wouldn't mind seeing us have a more standardized build setup.  We are pretty close, but I think it's probably best if we just pick one of the standards and comform to it as entirely as possible.

I'm leaning more towards the Java Blueprints strategy for webapps, but the Jakarta layout is fine as well.

http://java.sun.com/blueprints/code/projectconventions.html#99632

http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-4.0-doc/appdev/source.html

I also think the other goal we still need to keep in sight is to be able to actually package and deploy as a .war file.  We don't write to the webapp context anymore, but we do read a number of files/directories, so I'm not sure if we could do this yet.

-- Allen

> 
> Hen

Re: Installing Roller - Commentary

[Henri Yandell <fl...@gmail.com>]

On 10/9/05, Anil Gangolli <an...@busybuddha.org> wrote:
>
> It would have helped on the "all" target bit, and also on finding the build
> results, but you're right that we could and probably shoul dmake "all" the
> default target and the result location easier to guess without even reading
> (like maybe a dist dir at top level as an end result?).

If we put it in the form of a distribution, as gets released etc, then
dist/ would be a great name. If it's just a roller/ dir, then dist
would be confusing as it so often expects to have a tar.gz, .zip or
something.

Hen

Re: Installing Roller - Commentary

[Anil Gangolli <an...@busybuddha.org>]

This actually went remarkably smoothly.  Of course, you cheated by applying 
prior knowledge.  I'm not sure if the docs would have helped.  There is:

http://rollerweblogger.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=DeveloperGuide

[Out of date on where to get the source code, which I'm about to fix, but 
otherwise I think OK.]

It would have helped on the "all" target bit, and also on finding the build 
results, but you're right that we could and probably shoul dmake "all" the 
default target and the result location easier to guess without even reading 
(like maybe a dist dir at top level as an end result?).

--a.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Henri Yandell" <fl...@gmail.com>
To: <ro...@incubator.apache.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 09, 2005 6:05 PM
Subject: Installing Roller - Commentary


> Some thoughts on an installing of Roller (from the latest in SVN
> trunk, ie: 1.3-to-be). I'll install Roller 2.0 in a bit, so these
> comments are made without knowing which features are coming in 2.0.
>
> svn checkout, run ant, read message, run ant all. Noticec new build/
> directory, took a little while to find the bit that needs to be
> installed. Any reason not to delete: "compile_beans  compile_contrib
> compile_web  generated  junk  lib" after the build is complete? Or
> just dump the entire build directory after moving the roller/
> directory up one.
>
> Zipped up the roller directory move to another platform; went through
> the postgres dance to remember how to create a new database and after
> a quick find to find the sql to run. Cat that into the db, copy the
> roller.xml from my prod install to my dev install and we're away.
>
> All pretty good so far, obviously having done it before I'm not an
> ideal tester, but I don't think any of the above is hard to grasp.
>
> Next up, registering a blog/user. Went to the roller page, bit odd.
> Says 'Roller site' twice on the front.
>
> I registered a user, zoom, all very nice. It would be good to have a
> note on the first user page saying "This user will automatically be
> the admin". And then it would be good to have a page after that which
> the first user is forced to fill out with bits like 'Blog Server Name'
> to replace the default 'Roller Site'.
>
> Modified the Categories. I'm not sure defaults of Music General and
> Java are too great a set. Might be simpler to just go with General.
> Posted a quick blog entry. Logged out.
>
> I registered another blog/user. After logging in, no admin tab; so
> that worked :) Quick post; nice to see that the bug is fixed where
> changing the comments timeout sends me back to the top of the page.
> Probably fixed ages ago, I've been quite behind on the production
> blog.
>
> MediaCast setting needs a ? mark next to it (the popup help bit). I
> doubt people will have a clue what that means. I haven't :)
>
> There's a new link at the top called 'comments'. Needs to be
> capitalized. Also needs to work, looks like it's not executing as I
> get an empty page whose source contains:
>
> -----------------------
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
>
> <comments xmlns="http://www.joehewitt.com/content/blog.dtd"
>    entryid="$entry.Id">
> </comments>
> ------------------------
>
> I added a comment and it still kept doing that :)
>
> Nothing under 'Hot Weblogs' yet. Also Search is still daft. 'sheep'
> doesn't hit on 'sheepish' etc, ie: it's whole word searching. This
> could explain why Carrie always complains about the search not
> working. Bit more playing and I realise that * works. I never really
> paid any attention to the search before.
>
> Big fan of the "Convert Line Breaks" plugin by the way.
>
> Blogroll. Might need to take Lance's blog off of this; his site's been
> down for a bit (everything okay Lance?) and it seems poor to have a
> broken link on somebody's shiny new blog.
>
> That's all. I didn't install on top of a copy of our current database
> as Carrie's blog got rather screwed up a while ago. Still, I'll give
> that a try to see if I have to migrate the entries over manually or if
> the new version won't have the problems that our ancient 0.9.x version
> has.
>
> Also, I need to install Roller 2.0 so we can use that instead :)
>
> Hen