Hi All,

I've recently been doing a bit of spring cleaning on my Roller theme, one of
the things I find really useful is the ability to set up some user and entry
data in the Roller Database then use mvn jetty:run to view that data under
my current theme, what's really useful is to have the data persist across
multiple maven executions so I can see how my theme tweaks change things
without having to re-enter the data each time I start Roller.

I find something like the following allows me to make and review changes to
my theme quite quickly:

   1. Add some user and entry content to the Roller Database - including
   specific things I want to test whilst editing my theme
   2. Make change to theme files
   3. Start roller using mvn jetty:run
   4. Look at changes
   5. Stop jetty
   6. Repeat steps 2 to 4 until happy with theme

There's a snag however - at the moment the Roller build understandably needs
to clean down the Derby Database as it executes various goals, for the
purpose of theme development this can be quite frustrating as it means I
have to re-create users and entry data each time I make a tweak to my theme,
which can add a lot of time on to an otherwise simple theme tweak. To this
end I have made a small local modification to some of the maven POMs and the
StartDerbyTask class, my changes add a maven boolean property which can then
be configured to make the Database content persistent (or not) across maven
executions, the default is to not make the Database content persistent so
that anyone can still check out the Roller source code without modification
and perform a mvn clean install with exactly the same results as they would
do today.

I have found this change to be a really useful aid in my theme tweaking so I
thought I would email to see if anyone else might be interested in it? If
anyone is then I'd be happy to send my changes to one of the committers for
review in case it could be contributed back to the main project.

Cheers,

Edd

Web: http://www.eddgrant.com/
Blog: http://www.eddgrant.com/blog
Email: [email protected]
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