Roller is working out pretty well. No road blocks so far for anything that I wanted to do.
However, my approach is probably not the easiest way to do things. I have set up the main layout of the site in the _decorator.vm template. I edit this directly in my own theme and then reselect the theme to apply the changes. You don't actually have to reselect the theme each time – you can use the theme preview window to see your latest changes by just hitting F5.
I have my own theme just to see what maintaining a theme involves. The trouble is that you need to be able to edit the theme files directly on the server. No bother to me as I just use Emacs for that. But you do have to login to the server and use it from there.
The ideal setup is to edit locally and deploy remotely. To this end I have imported my theme files into a subversion repository and I will set up a local installation of Roller on my development machine. This should make things a little easier.
The only outstanding issue that I have at the moment is that my hacked atom.vm template does not format paragraphs properly, which is a bit naff – all the text just flows together. I will have to fix this as I do intend to post the full text of each entry in my feeds.
One word of warning, turn off the Textile Formatter plugin when you are posting source code, as it really arses it up.
