…when you’re raising bugs against it.

So my first Roller Weblogger bug, ROL-1667 or, rather, “Date URLs incorrectly use updateTime to sort entries“.

Basically the get entries pager is selecting entries based upon ‘Updated Date’ and not ‘Published Date’, so accessing entries via entry date, which you’d assume would use ‘Published Date’ actually displays them based upon ‘Updated Date’.

This effects all date based blog entry selections, so access via date string based URLs or via the Calendar (either large or small variant, whose selections resolve to date based URLs) are all effected too.

Thankfully Dave raised it for me on the roller bug traq site, although I’ve since created my own account too.

Given the Open Source paradigm, I’ve decided to try and contribute directly and fix it myself, if no one gets to it before me that is.

Dave was kind enough to give me the following advice re: contributing to Roller:

I usually point potential contributors to this: http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/x/2hsB

You can also contribute by telling us where our wiki and docs need improvement.

– Dave

During our email exchange about the bug I also asked Dave about overriding existing macros, especially the macro code for things like get weblog entries (the paging macro getWeblogEntriesPager) and the large calendar (or hCalendarTableBig as it’s also known).

He gave me the following advice:

Two places to look for additional info on macro coding:

1) Template Author Guide (get it here: http://roller.apache.org/download.cgi)
Lists all models, macros and shows HTML generated by each.

2) weblog.vm (http://tinyurl.com/yuwfvu)
Source code for all of the Roller macros.

– Dave

I found this bug whilst doing some template enhancements, around differing content per category, which once this bug is fixed I hope to implement. It showed up because of the tag policy I had implemented, and subsequently had a large number of blog entries which had been updated.