I'm glad to hear you are making good progress with this. I have a
couple of questions in-line below.
On Apr 4, 2006, at 10:07 AM, Henning Kulander wrote:
I've been working on getting support for multi domains in Roller. I
started out by making an extra servlet to handle requests
to /roller/domain, but after reviewing advice from Max Rudman, I chose
to follow his idea, and create a filter instead.
So now I have a version of Roller where roller is running under tomcat
on port 8080, if I access localhost:8080/roller/, I get the old
functionality, nothing is changed (in theory at least). In front of
tomcat I have an apache-server with mod_rewrite. Apache is
listening to
a virtual domain (blog.testdomain.com), and translating URLs to this
domain into the form
localhost/roller/domain/(service)blog.testdomain.com/(handle). So
blog.testdomain.com/page/testblog would is tranlated to
localhost/roller/domain/page/blog.testdomain.com/testblog.
Do users ever see the localhost/roller/domain/(service)
blog.testdomain.com/(handle) form of URL or is that hidden?
So far, there has been little need to change existing Roller-code.
I had
to create a DomainManager to handle the new database tables and their
pojo-implementations. The DomainManager needed to be added to
RollerManager so it can be used like the other managers, and that's
about it actually. But unfortunately the URLs generated throughout
Roller are never sent through encodeURL, so they are not picked up by
the wrappers. This resulted in quite a few changes in velocity macros.
All these changes consists in sending the URL through
pageHelper.strutsUrlHelper(). This in turn calls the encodeURL
method in
the wrapper. In addition, SearchServlet and *WeblogCalendarModel
needed
to be changed. SearchServlet needs to use another context
initializer so
the pageHelper object is available in the velocity scripts,
WeblogCalendarModel needs to call encodeURL on the URLs they create.
This enables all URLs to be rewritten to the
form /roller/domain/(service)/(domain)/(handle) on the way out, so the
user still thinks he is on the domain. In addition, these changes
enables the use of UrlRewriteFilter in Roller, so you can do whatever
magic this can do. I use UrlRewriteFilter to rewrite
the /roller/domain/(service)/(domain)(handle) URLs to the more user
friendly form of http://(domain)/(service)/(handle).
Why do you need URLs to pass through encodeURL? Is that the "hook"
you use to transform URLs?
Now that you are calling encodeURL for all URLs, are you seeing a
jsessionid on every URL created by Roller?
The same thing goes for redirects, like when the user commits a
comment.
The redirect is picked up by the wrapper and sent through encodeURL to
translate the URL to the correct form before the user is actually
redirected.
So what's working right now?
Basically everything a normal blog reader needs,
- Browsing a users blog through back, forward, calendar etc.
- Reading RSS-feeds.
- Searching int the site (searching all sites does not work right).
- Reading comments in a blog
- Writing comments in a blog
- Having one Roller-website appear in more than one domain with
different handles.
That sounds like good progress.
What doesn't work?
Everything domain specific except the features listed above.
- Logging in sends the user to the global roller domain (ie. /
roller/*)
- There is no way to add domains, add websites to a domain except
hacking directly in (my)SQL.
What next?
The features we have now is the bare minimum needed to present
blogs to
web surfers and have them believe that they are browsing different
domains when they are actually only browsing on one server. This is
useful to us in it self, but we also need a way to configure this
without hacking the database directly, and we need a way to let the
user
log in on one domain, and administer his websites on that domain. The
most important thing here is the ability to edit and write entries.
So that leaves these priorities.
- Adding a user interface where the administrator can add domains, and
put websites into different domains.
- Figure out how to enable login on one domain, and not redirect the
user to the global roller domain.
- At a minimum, enable editing and creation of entries on a domain.
- Enable domain wide search.
We are still very interested in getting these changes upstream
eventually, and we are working hard not to break existing
functionality
or add complexity. We are thankful for the feedback we have got so
far.
If anybody is interested, I can make my patches available. We are
currently working on Roller 2.1 stable. Once 2.2 is available we will
upgrade our patches to 2.2.
How are you managing the new code you've added? Are you using he
custom/*.xmlf mechanism or just adding new code into the Roller
source tree?
- Dave
