Re: How to access JRoller weblogs from another web application

I think you are overestimating the complexity of altering the Roller 
look and feel to match that of the business application (just go to the 
templates page within the Roller admin and edit your CSS and fonts, etc. 
to whatever the business app has), and as a result choosing a more 
complex approach (RSS or Atom) that will require you to implement a full 
blogging UI from scratch--including all the CSS stuff that you're 
supposedly saving by not altering Roller directly.

If you can task the front-end person (may be you :) who created the 
corporate website to just alter the Roller blog theme to match it 
(presumably the same front-end person who would be making the new blog 
UI you're proposing anyway), he/she may be able to make it identical.  
Just check all the Roller blogs 
(https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/PoweredByRoller -- 
Banque de Luxembourg might be a good example) and themes 
(https://code.google.com/a/apache-extras.org/p/roller-extras/wiki/Themes), 
Roller can be morphed to look like just about anything. With a few hours 
of CSS work you blog may look 80-90% similar as your corporate site, 
from there you can inch up to 100% as you have time available.

As for your second concern, again, by altering the templates, you 
welcome to create whatever static links you wish to link back to the 
main corporate website.  Some more Roller tips: 
https://web-gmazza.rhcloud.com/blog/entry/apache-roller-blogging. Also, 
the Roller documentation available from the home page has a Template 
Guide to show how you can change the behavior of your blog if desired.

But if you want to start from scratch, probably reading the Roller Atom 
or RSS feed and looking at the Roller source code for how to implement 
commenting (or just use Disqus and skip Roller commenting) would be the 
way to go.

Glen

On 11/13/2014 07:45 AM, Lee Chalupa wrote:
> Glen:
>
> Here is what I'm looking to achieve.  I support a java web application
> for a business.  They want a blog built into their application.  Roller
> has everything I need regarding functionality and data.  I need a way to
> be able to integrate Roller into this web application in two ways: one,
> the look and feel of the blog has to be the same as the business web
> application, and two: the web application will link to Roller and when
> the user is done with the blog, the user can easily return to the web
> application. It would be like like the user never left the business web app.
>
> I am not familiar with RSS but I could easily get up to speed.  Are you
> referring to the possible use of RSS to do this?
> I assume an RSS instance could be written to include any of the model
> elements in Roller?  I assume I could write the RSS to meet my requirements.
> Can I think of RSS as a view of the data?  So I might have more than one
> RSS feed?  So for example, there might be one RSS (view) for the current
> log entry and  their might be another RSS (view) for showing the blog's
> archives?
>
> How would this work?  So the business web app would call a URL for the
> RSS feed that it wants.  The app would then parse the RSS and populate a
> blog page in the business web site, using CSS consistent with site?
>
> The authoring of the blog would all be done in the Roller application.
> The business appl is reading the blog information and displaying it. The
> business appl will also need to be able to comment on the blog.  Not
> sure how this would work with RSS?  I seem to recall that Roller has
> some functionality that will support this requirement.
>
> It's dark in here....Any light you can shed on this subject will be
> greatly appreciated.
>
> Lee
>
>
>
> On 11/13/2014 06:19 AM, Glen Mazza wrote:
>> I wonder why exposing your Roller blog directly to the public so they
>> can "read the weblog and provide comments as feedback" would not work
>> in your situation.  You have extensive templating capability in Roller
>> to make the blog look as you wish.
>>
>> Glen
>>
>> On 11/13/2014 07:03 AM, Lee Chalupa wrote:
>>> Thank you for your reply Glen.  I am referring to Apache Roller.
>>>
>>> Lee
>>>
>>>
>>> On 11/12/2014 09:01 PM, Glen Mazza wrote:
>>>> You mean JRoller, the deprecated blogging service that uses Roller, or
>>>> Apache Roller, the blogging software you install and blog with?
>>>>
>>>> If the former, normally you can read the RSS / Atom feeds (although
>>>> JRoller is old so probably just RSS) and do what you want with them.
>>>> Google about parsing RSS once you're there.
>>>>
>>>> If Roller, well Roller is the web application that displays your blogs
>>>> as you want to display them.  But you can probably use Atom/RSS again
>>>> to get the articles if you want to format it elsewhere.
>>>>
>>>> Glen
>>>>
>>>> On 11/12/2014 09:26 AM, Lee Chalupa wrote:
>>>>> -------- Forwarded Message --------
>>>>> Subject:     How to access JRoller weblogs from another website
>>>>> Date:     Wed, 12 Nov 2014 08:08:50 -0600
>>>>> From:     Lee Chalupa <[email protected]>
>>>>> To:     [email protected]
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Hello:
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm trying to implement the following user story using JRoller.  Can
>>>>> JRoller support this use case?
>>>>>
>>>>> User Story:
>>>>>
>>>>> As the author of a weblog,  I would like to read the content of a
>>>>> weblog
>>>>> that is created in JRoller and publish the entries on a webpage on an
>>>>> external customer-facing web site so customers are able to read the
>>>>> weblog and provide comments as feedback.
>>>>>
>>>>> Can you provide a high-level description of how I would go about this.
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks
>>>>>
>>>>> Lee
>>>>>
>>>>>