For my German blog over at nosilverbullet.de I use Roller as the blog engine. Being a lazy person I did not bother to design a theme for myself. So I went over to roller.dev.java.net and downloaded the theme collection. Of these the theme "rational" was the one I chose for my blog.

Testing the theme on my development box I surprisingly noticed that I wasn't able to post comments. Of course I looked for the reason at all the wrong places. I downloaded the roller sources, added logging code to some of the Java-code, checked the database-tables and generally did some finding and grepping on the source base.

Well actually the solution was pretty easy. It was a simple bug in the view code, in the Weblog.vm (the Velocity template responsible for displaying the blog entries).

As a good open source citizen I filed a bug report at

https://roller.dev.java.net/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3

If you consider using rational yourself just apply this patch:

60,61c60,61
<                            #showWeblogEntryComments($entry)
<                            #showWeblogEntryCommentForm($entry)
---
>                            #showWeblogEntryComments($model.weblogEntry)
>                            #showWeblogEntryCommentForm($model.weblogEntry)

So this is what I like about open source, being able to look at the source. For the vast majority of projects I use, I have never actually done this. But I want to be able to do so, if the need occurs.

So, may the source always be with you!