roller 4 + planet

In this post I will cover getting started with the Roller4.0 blogging software including setting up the planet (aggregation server).

Anyway, I am using the mysql database (5.0.41 community edition) with roller 4
(best available) which i placed in Tomcat’s webapps directory naming the folder roller4_0 .

I am using tomcat 5.5 with java5.

Setup: Tomcat’s common/classes folder have placed file roller-custom.properties:
installation.type=auto
database.configurationType=jdbc
database.jdbc.driverClass=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
database.jdbc.connectionURL=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/rollerdb
database.jdbc.username=root
database.jdbc.password=admin
mail.configurationType=properties
mail.hostname=smtp-server.nc.rr.com
mail.username=x
mail.password=x

Important: You need to put the mysql driver, and two other jars into Tomcats’s common/lib directory:

• mysql-connector-java-3.1.13-bin
• activation (obtained from my java 5 lib folder)
• mail (obtained from my java 5 lib folder)

 

After starting Tomcat, I go to the main screen via url http://localhost:8080/roller4_0/index.jsp

which says I have a successful connection but have no tables . So I click the button to create the tables.

Then, I get the page to create users and the blog.

Yes, you need a planet-custom properties (roller-custom.properties in common/classes) file…

I set up a blog which i called planet which I give a theme of
roller front page…

My weblog template now has
## 1) SITE-WIDE entries (the default)
##set($pager = $site.getWeblogEntriesPager($since, $maxResults))

## 2) PLANET-entries
#set($pager = $planet.getAggregationPager($since, $maxResults))
## The below pager code should work against either

the planet blog _must_ be the frontpage blog (this is not optional as
I thought).enable “Enable aggregated site-wide frontpage” (this is on by default)

“That’s true because the Installation Guide tells you to put the
PlanetModel in the ‘rendering.siteModels’ list.If you want Planet aggregations to be available to all blogs you can
put the model in the ‘rendering.pageModels’ list.

Or, if you are an admin user the you can add the PlanetModel to
individual blogs via the blog’s Preferences->Settings page.”

3- in roller-custom.properties
planet.aggregator.enabled=true
cache.dir= /mycache/planetcache
planet.aggregator.guice.module=\
org.apache.roller.weblogger.planet.business.jpa.RollerPlanetModule
# Tasks which are enabled. Only tasks listed here will be run.
tasks.enabled=ScheduledEntries
Task,ResetHitCountsTask,\
TurnoverReferersTask,PingQueueTask,RefreshRollerPlanetTask,SyncWebsitesTask
# Set of page models specifically for site-wide rendering
rendering.siteModels=\
org.apache.roller.weblogger.ui.rendering.model.SiteModel,\
org.apache.roller.weblogger.ui.rendering.model.PlanetModel

The installation guide says the planet cache directory property is
named planet.aggregator.cache.dir, but the planet.properties file
looks like it uses cache.dir

It should be RefreshRollerPlanetTask not RefreshPlanetRollerTask

planet-custom.properties:

database.configurationType=jdbc

database.jdbc.driverClass=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
database.jdbc.connectionURL=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/rollerdb
database.jdbc.username=x
database.jdbc.password=y