Raible Designs

Upgrading to Roller 0.9.7

I'm starting the upgrade to Roller 0.9.7. Don't stand by with too much earnest - if I get interrupted by Julie and Abbie - they have priority. I'll let you know when I'm done.

Later: I might as well keep a record of what I do to upgrade so it'll be easier next time - and maybe I'll eventually write a script to do it all.

1. I dumped the mysql database from this site using mysqldump. I then created a database locally and imported it.

2. I ran the 0.9.6 to 0.9.7 upgrade script for mysql. I encountered a few errors as I was partially on 0.9.7 already.

3. I edited the log4j.properties file to e-mail me errors and to cut down on Velocity and Hibernate logging. I also got rid of the "R" appender, as that was writing a roller.log file that is essentially the same as Tomcat's log file. I also added timestamping to the log messages.

# Properties for configuring Log4j for this application
# This is the configuring for logging displayed in the Application Server
log4j.rootCategory=INFO, stdout, mail

log4j.appender.stdout=org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender
log4j.appender.stdout.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout

# Pattern to output the caller's file name and line number.
log4j.appender.stdout.layout.ConversionPattern=%d %C{1}.%M(%L) | %m%n

# Configuration for receiving e-mails when ERROR messages occur.
log4j.appender.mail=org.apache.log4j.net.SMTPAppender
[email protected]
[email protected]
log4j.appender.mail.SMTPHost=localhost
log4j.appender.mail.Threshold=ERROR
log4j.appender.mail.BufferSize=1
log4j.appender.mail.Subject=[www] Roller Application Error

log4j.appender.mail.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.mail.layout.ConversionPattern=%d [%t] %c %x - %m%n

# If programmed properly the most messages would be at DEBUG 
# and the least at FATAL.

# Options are: DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR, FATAL
log4j.logger.org.roller=ERROR
log4j.logger.org.apache.velocity=ERROR
log4j.logger.org.apache.commons=ERROR
log4j.logger.org.apache.struts=ERROR

# All hibernate log output of "info" level or higher goes to stdout.
# For more verbose logging, change the "info" to "debug" on the last line.
log4j.logger.net.sf.hibernate.ps.PreparedStatementCache=ERROR
log4j.logger.net.sf.hibernate=ERROR

4. Whoa! There's a new look to the index.jsp page. I corrected a small bug in the link around the combined rss badge.

5. I changed oscache.properties to have a "cache.path" that was prudent for my installation.

6. Added home.jsp and changed "main" forward in struts-config.xml to have a path="/home.jsp" so users will be directed to this page, rather than the index.jsp.

7. Onto synchronizing my current web.xml with the new one. Added <welcome-file-list>, <error-page>'s and security settings for my private weblog. Sweet, JSTL has been added so I don't have to add these taglibs or jars. I changed the <form-error-page> to "/login.jsp?error=true". Funny thing is, I never see the login page anymore since I'm using the "Remember Me" feature.

8. Added all custom images from my about page to the "images" directory. Also moved my custom favicon.ico from backed up directory to new roller installation directory.

9. Next, I synched up the settings from my roller-config.xml file with the new one. FYI, e-mailing comments is off by default.

10. Now I guess I need to convert all my pages to use the new macros. I'll do this after upgrading the codebase here. It's kindof a pain to upgrade the codebase, as you've already seen. One of my problems is I have symlinks all over the place in my "roller" directory, so rather than re-creating them, I just upload a .jar of roller, unzip it, and cp -r roller/* webapps/roller/. over my last installation. Crossing my fingers now.

After upgrading code: It looks like I changed the wrong forward, rather than "main", I should've changed "home.page" to home.jsp. I'll let you know if I spot anything crazy while attempting to do my macro migration.

Update: After the macro migration, the only issue I've found (so far) is that #showWebsiteTitle() adds spaces on both ends, and since I'm writing this using JavaScript (for the title image), it's screwing things up. I reverted back to $macros.showWebsiteTitle() and everything works as expected. Now I just have to figure out how to get trackback setup. I tried this, but it didn't work for me. Also, I can't seem to get #showAllNewsfeeds(true 1) to work.