i checked the antville rss feeds against the rss validator at archive.org and fixed two bugs that violated the rdf specs (updates in cvs and at antville.org).

today, i modified the rss output and the commentcounter macro. rss just got a check if the story title is not null (to avoid it being rendered as string "null"). this is due to the story extension features which allows to leave out the title property completely

the commentcounter macro got an additional "as" parameter. with it one can determine whether the output should be rendered as links, generally (ie. no matter how little comments there are) or as text (no links at all). if param.as is missing, only comment amounts > 0 will be rendered as links. is it now smart enough to fulfill any needs?

addendum: recent changes today in page.skins. stylesheets and javascript codes from now on are being linked to.

i just commited some changes into CVS:

• users now can decide (when registering or editing their profile) if their email-address may appear public or not. if they decide it should *not* be public it will also not appear on any administrative page (like the members-page for admins of a weblog).
• users can now also enter an email-address as url in their profile, which will be prefixed with "mailto:" if missing (a partial implementation of this request).

I also modified the current version of antville running here on antville.org: email-addresses are generally not displayed, not even on administrative pages.

(short note to project members: i'm offline for the next week since i'll be on the road to vienna).

i decided to merge my additions and modifications in the helmaville branch with the main branch. here's a short list of changes i implemented so far:

1. storylist macro
2. custom clipping in renderTextPreview
3. the title property of stories and comments is kept along with its corresponding value in the xml content
4. new doctype / document header in page.skin for xhtml conformance
5. created a new createtime_macro() function in the hopobject prototype and removed it from at least four specific prototypes.
6. shortcuts (improved but still experimental)

moreover, i am currently going through this list and strike out feature by feature (as far as i feel able to implement it):

1. changed explicit and verbose date format parameter to "short" in comment skins
2. default title in new comment ("Re: previous title"; experimental)
3. extended the topic macro to support generation of topic icons, links or simple plain output of the topic's name

i hope i did not forget anything... (and that everything works and nothing else is broken)

I just commited a patch that adds some of the missing skins to the skin manager main page. The addes skins are:

• single topic main page
• topic overview main page
• story manager main page
• site search form
• site search result skin

Have a look at the CVS diff. The patch was contributed by Mr. Arno of Murmel Comics fame - thanks Arno!

i rewrote the navigation-macro according to this RFC: basic navigation for all users is now placed in the main skin and the navigation-links for contributors and admins can be placed independently by using

<% site.navigation for="contributors|admins" %>

the new navigation-macro is backwards-compatible, so there shouldn't be any problems with existing modified page-skins (points 5 and 6 of the RFC are still open).

i also embedded the search-form directly in page.skin (as discussed here, but didn't write a macro for it). currently it looks like this:

default text disappears onClick, and search-keywords are echoed. let me know what you think!

the following has changed:

• implemented kris suggestions here and here (thanks, kris!). this should ease image- and file-upload a lot since it's not necessary anymore to specify a name - antville will construct one (this also works with hensos get-image-by-url-function). if a name is already in use, antville will add a number to the name and increase it until an unused name is found. also the checkbox for creating a thumbnail was removed: thumbnails are now created automatically if the width or height of an image are > 100 pixel.
• it's now possible to enable/disable comments for each story. i reinvoked the until then deprecated commentlink-macro because the link to "place your comment" now disappears if comments are disabled (same with the comment-counter). still wondering if it makes sense to be able to limit comments to contributors, admins ... (btw.: there's a new dbpatch that enables discussions for all existing stories)
• the input-macro moved from hopobject to global (it never made sense there) and echoes request-values by default).

still to be done: couldn't solve the nasty upload-error reported by smi and several others. any ideas out there?