Jetspeed Skinning/Deployment
Well, it's been quite an excercise over the last week or so. I've been using the Jakarta Jetspeed portal as the main section of my website (wittle.net). Then I added roller as a weblog tool. I liked the skins available with roller so much better than the ones with Jetspeed that I decided to make a Jetspeed skin that matched my favorite roller one. What an excercise!
First, there's a pretty good amount of formatting information embedded in the multiple velocity templates, so I ended up changing ~15-20 files to get the look I wanted. Second, I found a bug that messes up the base URL specified in the head section of some of the templates, which breaks the images for the controls.
Lastly, I wanted to make these changes in separate files so that I could migrate Jetspeed versions without major pain and suffering. After quite a while of trying to get this to work, I found that the old method of isolating customizations, which involved specifying a new, custom .properties file in Torque.Properties was incompatible with the new way that uses a Maven plugin. If you have an include statement in a Mavven merge file, it tries to follow the include to merge the properties from the include file and can't follow the link.
Finally, though, I've got the skin I wanted. Now I need to finish converting over from Oracle to mysql as the database behind Jetspeed so that I don't have to use different databases for Roller and Jetspeed. If only Roller was database-agnostic, I'd be happy. I know mysql is open source and fast, but I'm not that excited about learning a bunch of new management tools just to make Roller happy. I started to look at converting Roller to use Oracle, but there are too many mysql-isms in the code to make that easy.