I want to describe the one customization I have applied to Roller, and
ask if there's a better way to accomplish it, either in 3.1 or 4.0.
The "anchor" generated for blog posts (which appears in the url) is not
to my liking. I don't want extra words stripped out, I want dashes
rather than underscores (widely regarded as preferable for Google SEO),
and I'd like to apply some special rules (e.g. replace ampersand with
the word 'and'). Basically I want better-looking URLs.
To accomplish this, I modified
org.apache.roller.pojos.WeblogEntryData.createAnchorBase to do things my
way, and patched roller-business.jar. It's an embarassing hack. I
think I tried using a patch jar and ran into classloader security
problems, but it's been a little while. I think maybe I could fix that
if I put my patch jar in a dark place it doesn't belong.
Anyway, in an ideal world I'd like to compile a single subclass against
the Roller jars, run a patch jar over the release build, and make a
single configuration change to tell Roller to use my new class.
Scratch that. In an ideal world I'd like something as arbitrary as
createAnchorBase to be explicitly implemented as a customization point.
Any thoughts?
