I agree that there is a general problem, at least in Roller, with
templating. We need to 1) make templates easier for people to use and
edit and 2) make them easier to share both as full themes and as
individual snipets so that a community can grow to support itself here.
I don't know how other java blog software does its templating, but it
would definitely be cool if the solution could work for everyone.
A couple very general thoughts about this ...
1. IMO velocity is not as nice as freemarker as a templating engine. I
still have more to learn about freemarker, but it looks to have much
more capabilities for creating user defined directives, which I believe
would be a huge improvement over the way we use velocity macros. Adding
freemarker support to Roller is a one day activity, the only real pain
here is migration for existing users, which I know would not be fun.
2. Whether we could create a solution that works for all java based
blogging software or not, the ability to convert MT and Wordpress themes
into Roller themes would be huge as well. This would be a great way to
jumpstart the theme library.
-- Allen
Sean Gilligan wrote:
The March 17th deadline is coming up fast. Any ideas for interesting
Roller development? - Dave
Here's one --
Create a standard blog template tag library and suite of templates
that could
be used by Roller and (with some effort by the other project) any
other (JVM-based) blog.
I presented
<http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/roller-dev/200603.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
some of these ideas about 2 years ago (my how time flies) and many of
the pre-reqs have since been built.
Java blog software fights an uphill battle for lots of reasons. One
reason is lack of pretty templates (not to put down any of the fine work
that has been done, but WordPress has probably two orders of magnitude
more choices available) So maybe the other Java blog projects could
join in on the development and at the very least define an extensible
baseline spec for blog templates. Then the different Java blog projects
could focus on fighting some of the other uphill battles.
-- Sean
