Anil Gangolli wrote:

I installed 3.1RC1 on my dev box. Seemed to be clean using a fresh db installation and 3.0 required-jars package.

I was trying the tag-related functionality out and I see a few issues:

(1) The tag entry field on the entry edit page uses space separation and doesn't seem to accomodate tags that include spaces. I tried quoting with double-quotes; that didn't seem to work.

Yes, that is the expected behavior. We talked about this when we were evaluating the tags proposal and decided that most sites seem to be using the solution that we have, where tags cannot be multi word phrases.



(2) The user guide link in the JSP footer seems to point off to an old 2.x guide. I was looking for and couldn't find the documentation in the 3.1 guides on the various forms of URLs, specifically I was looking to test the tag-based URLs. I know I've seen it somewhere, but I can't remember where.

Hmm. For the user guide I think it would be nice if these kinds of links pointed to urls within the app, like /roller-ui/docs/*, for user documentation about the current app version.

I may also take this opportunity to throw out an idea I had a little while ago for documentation that was related to this. It seems to me that since blogging is supposed to website publishing made easy then one of the key components of a really mature blog system would be good documentation throughout the application. I haven't been a big documentation contributor in the past, but I think that's more because I felt the app needed more work and less docs at the time. Now that the app is getting more and more mature it may be time to consider a nice solution for providing rich documentation.

So what I had been thinking about was a way where we could write all of our documentation in small and easily reusable components, possibly in xml, which we could easily use to either 1) provide a full help guide document (aka user guide) or 2) take bits and pieces of the docs and be able to insert them directly into the appropriate pages.

So for example, if a user is on the 'Templates' page and is working on customizing their blog then we could have some documentation hooks which provide contextual help info like ...

1. what is this page for?
2. what can i do on this page?
3. how do i use this page?
4. what do each of the fields on this page mean?
5. how does this affect my blog?

So for the 'Templates' page the top of the page may provide quick links which give a couple paragraphs of text explaining what the page is for and what you do on the page. Then you have the large text area where you can modify your templates which could have a little tool tip icon next to it which would tell the user what that field is for. Then possibly at the bottom of the page we include a quick reference sheet of the models and macros to help users while they are authoring templates.

One of the things that I think Roller has been hurting on is usability and in my mind of the most important elements of usability when it comes to web tools is contextual documentation. I think doing something like this could really help make Roller a more user friendly blogging system.



(3) Tags don't seem to be displayed anywhere in the "basic" theme at all. Shouldn't we update this to show tags on entries, including an actual rel tag ?

I think there may not have been any real consensus about whether or not to promote tags in the themes since in many cases users may not be using tags.



(4) I couldn't get anything to show up in the "Hot Tags" area of the front page. Haven't investigated what is happening yet; this may be my own problem.

Dunno about that one.

-- Allen



--a.


----- Original Message ----- From: "Dave" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, November 20, 2006 5:57 PM
Subject: Apache Roller 3.1RC1 (incubating) ready for testing


Thank you and yes, I meant 3.1.

With releasing 3.1, re-releasing 2.3.1 and working on 3.2 I've got a couple
too many versions floating around in my head.

- Dave



On 11/20/06, Jeffrey Blattman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
did you mean 3.1 RC1, or are we skipping 3.1?

Dave wrote:
> I've merged all applicable bug fixes from trunk to the roller_3.1
> branch and prepared a first release candidate for the 3.1 release. You
> can find the release files and latest 3.1 docs here:
>
>   http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/apache-roller-3.1/
>
> Here's the What's New in Roller 3.1 page:
>   http://rollerweblogger.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Roller_3.1_WhatsNew
>
> Release candidates are for testing purposes only.
>
> Please help out. The sooner you download, test and report bugs the
> sooner we'll be able to fix them and get the release out. So please
> help out the project and take RC1 for a spin.
>
> - Dave



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