• all pages with default skins should now validate as xhtml 1.0 compliant .
• layout, wording and naming have been unified.
• image and file previews contain more information (image type, file size etc.)
• added pagelink css class in style skin to customize prevpage and nextpage links.
• window titles provide more information about the page's contents (e.g. story title, topic name).
• commentcounter macro displays "no" and "one" parameter as is.
• storyeditor has now a new layout which is much easier to use
• linkedpath-macro was fixed
• usernames can now contain spaces and umlauts
• story management: code to embed a story is now displayed for copy & paste
• changed default date-formats and removed the confusing ones
• link to subscribing a site doesn't appear anymore if subscription is denied (eg. in private sites)
• "rescue" mechanism for stories and comments was finetuned. if a session times while writing a story users will be redirected back to login form, and after successfully logged in redirected back to the story/comment form already containing the text written before. with this it should be really hard to loose a story/comment.
• rss-action now has additional parameter "show=all" which includes the comments into the rss-feed.
• rss only contains e-mail addresses of users who enabled "e-mail is visible" in their profile.
• system management console now has a status-page showing memory- and request-statistics (plus some more info). system management is linked on the front page if the current user has sysadmin rights.
• shortcut support was removed from antville core, it's a module now.
• names of files can now contain spaces, commas, dashes, but *not* umlauts.
• story timestamps are now rendered correctly with respect to the timezone specified in site preferences.

thanks to robert for the list.

i just checked in the changes i had to make in the antville code to better conform with the xhtml spec (ie. this does not affect what's running jere at antville.org).

i verified almost every antville page (ie. i left out the sysadmin stuff and probably some pages i did not think of) against validator.w3.org and modified the skins where necessary. by the way i was able to fix some minor bugs, too.

however, i know about three validation errors that will remain, yet:

1. the attribute wrap="virtual" in textarea elements is invalid.
2. the name attribute in option elements is invalid.
3. the skin url queries ("?proto=image&name=preview") in the skin manager cause strange validator errors.

i left these imperfections as is because for the first two errors i don't know about a simple fix, yet, and for the third one i assume this must be a bug in the validator (please correct me if i am wrong).

moreover, i tried to achieve a more consistent layout for some pages (e.g. images, files, polls). i hope i achieved this goal and more important that nothing is broken. your comments are welcome.

i'm happy to announce that the first release candidate of Antville 1.0 is now available for download (.tar.gz and .zip).

There's also an updated version 1.0pre5 of Antclick available (.tar.gz and .zip). Those who have Antclick pre4 already running should follow these upgrade instructions.

Together with this i also put an up-to-date version of the application documentation online (you can download it in .tar.gz or .zip format).

Please give it a try. If you find any bugs post them here or - even better - in our bugtracking system. Please also post a short note here if you didn't find any bugs or strange behaviour since this is the only way i can estimate the level of testing pre1 has got. If everything goes well the final release of Antville 1.0 will be out within one week.

i implemented part of the contributions by michi/twoday.net. there's the list of changes:

• most important, i changed the story-editform to the much cleaner version of twoday.net. however i managed to keep it backwards-compatible to the old storyeditor, so even if you modified the skin it should still work as expected. If not please report here (the only visible change is that the editableby-macro now produces a set of three radio-elements instead of one dropdown). Due to this i also had to change the basic style-skin. Use the diff-feature to figure out what has changed.
• antville now accepts icons as uploaded images
• creating a new site now leads to a new entry in syslog

all of the changes above are currently only in cvs. please give it a try, and many thanks to michi!

i just updated antville (both cvs-version and the one that's installed here):

• fixed the troubles with the linkedpath-macro as reported by JohnWalsh
• fixed a problem with the image-macro that was reported by kantel. plus image-popups should now also be useable for those who have javascript disabled by linking to the fullsize-image.

thanks for the reports and please keep reporting any other bugs. since antville.org now runs fine with the latest cvs-version of antville for several days i plan to create the 1.0FC-distribution tomorrow. keep your fingers crossed (kris, did you have time to update the readme?)

kris sent me an extension for the backlinks-macro (which was born in this thread) and i implemented it, so the backlinks-macro has two new optional attributes:

<% story.backlinks limit="10" exclude="google,search,hotbot" %>

limit does what the name says. the upper limit which cannot be overridden is 100 backlinks (i don't think more makes sense anyway).

exclude must be a comma-delimited list of strings. whenever one of the strings appears in a backlink it will not be displayed, meaning that "search" will not display backlinks from search.yahoo.com, www.search.com, and also not a referrer like www.google.com

because referrers are written asynchronously to the database the whole backlinks-list is now also cached for about 1 minute (it will be re-rendered after scheduler did his job of writing the referrers).

the change is currently only in cvs and not implemented here at antville.org. please give it a try and tell me what you think about it. and thanks for the contribution, kris!

i've updated the need_for_speed-branch. it should be fully functional now and (hopefully significantly) faster compared to the main-branch of antville (quite a bunch of code was either removed or streamlined). please give it a try and tell me how it performs on your systems (and of course: please report any new - or newly introduced - bugs).

i think we're really close to the mysterious FC now ;-)