Roller 3.0 to 4.0

I chose Roller as my blog software simplely because I already had one of its runtime environment installed in my system.  I already installed  the Sun Java Application Server, known as the Glassfish now, when I started working on my EJB application some years ago. 

It took me some time to install and configure Roller 3.0 for it requried some dependent packages from some third-party.  Overall, it wasn't too bad and it's up and running finally.  I aslo installed some other additional Rolloer Themes.  It's nice to have so many themes available.

As I upgraded my system to an Ubuntu system, I decided to also upgrade Roller to Roller 4.0.   Roller 4.0 was quite easier to install or upgrade than Roller 3.0.   I just edited the roller-custom.properties and place it in /glassfishv2/domains/domain1/lib/classes and I was ready to go.  Here is the contents:

installation.type=auto database.configurationType=jdbc database.jdbc.driverClass=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver database.jdbc.connectionURL=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/rollerdb?autoReconnect=true& useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf-8&mysqlEncoding=utf8 database.jdbc.username=sqluser database.jdbc.password=tsqlpassword mail.configurationType=properties mail.hostname=localhost

If you blog in languages other than English, you need to set the character set of your MYSQL server to be unicode utf8.  Edit the your my.cnf and add the following:

[client] default-character-set=utf8 [mysqld] character-set-server=utf8 default-collation=utf8_unicode_ci default-character-set=utf8

Also you need to change the JDBC connection string as follow to support utf8:

jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/rollerdb?autoReconnect=true& useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf-8&mysqlEncoding=utf8

One thing I am not happy about Roller 4.0 is that the Roller Themes from 3.0 don't work for Roller 4.0 any more.  There aren't any additional themes available for dowonload from the Roller Support Project.  Hope more themes are available soon.