gmcdonald

So I bit the bullet and have moved away from MovableType (though my old posts are still available until I can import them into Roller). And I decided to try out the unofficial snapshot available here so I can test a few things out.

Installation was fine (in combination with Tomcat 6, Java 6 and mySQL 5) so basically follow the Roller 4.01 install guide.

A few things I noticed :-

1. After creating an account, creating a weblog and setting the front page theme, I got a 500 error from Tomcat instead of the front page. I found that having the ‘Enable aggregated site-wide frontpage’ checkbox ticked causes the error – which complained that the Planet had not yet been bootstrapped. This error does not occur in Roller 4.0.1 and aggregation works fine with this setting on (as blogs.apache.org shows). I guess I need to configure the planet feed aggregator (section 9.1 of the 4.0.1 docs) in order for this to work in 5.0-dev, but that's a guess and if true then 4.0.1 is buggy for allowing it. Un-ticking the checkbox and my front page worked fine (after a fight with Tomcat and jsvc to redeploy, see point 2 below)
2. When re-deploying Roller 5.0-dev in the Tomcat manager it tends to hang. Checking it out found that jsvc was eating between 90% and 130% CPU (really!). I left it for a few minutes before killing it off and restarting tomcat. All worked fine after that. Doing the same in Tomcat 6 with Roller 4.0.1 had no such problems (so far touch wood, but it does give PermGen Out Of Memory errors every now and then)
3. There is now an option built in to disable user accounts from creating their own weblogs, yay! (and is disabled by default which is good).
4. oauth support is built in (though experimental I believe) and have yet to try it. When the session fixation attack exploit is fixed I might :)
5. Support is built in for the AtomPub protocol (which I will try when point 4 above is fixed)

I will keep testing over the next little while and see how things go.