In the stylesheet:

.photoframe { padding: 4px; background-color: #eee; border-color: #ccc; border-width: 2px; border-style: solid; }

In the history:

< % image name="nameoftheimage" class="photoframe" % >

One major annoyance when creating offline stories is that one does not get to the freshly created story, but to the story manager instead where you have links to edit/delete/publish the story, but can't read/view the story in its full presentation. The way I see it, creating stories offline often serves the purpose to re-read the story before publishing it - yet to do this, one has to click several times between the story manager interface where stories are set online and the story view where the story can be read/viewed.

I tried to fix this and I'm asking whether you agree that what I came up with is preferrable to the status quo. Here's what's changed:

• When a story is created, one is always redirected to the full story view. (This should always be viewable for the author, even on websites where the author does not hold any special roles, right?)
• I changed the story.onlinelink_macro default behavior to only display a link to set the story online if the story is offline, but not to set it offline if it is online. To get links in both directions, the macro must be called with the option mode="toggle".
• The default story/main.skin gets a story.onlinelink macro with default behaviour (i.e. link is only displayd to set story online if it is currently offline) next to the story.editlink. The storymanager view gets a story.onlinelink with mode="toggle", i.e the online/offline link is always displayed.

With these changes, creating a story as offline is equivalent to seeing a preview before publishing, with links to either do some more editing or set it online.

What do you think?

this belongs to this story, but it's too long for the frontpage and to wide for a comment, so i put it here :-)

i implemented the feature mentioned there in my local antville installation by modifying link_macro(param) in hopobject/macros.js to use a new function linkTitle(url) that i put into hopobject/objectFunctions for the sake of simplicity. i guess this is the wrong place to do this, because it only works with <% site.link %>, but not with <% link %>. anyway, the code itself works fine, so here it is:

link_macro as it was before:

function link_macro(param) {
  if (param.checkdeny == "true") {
    if (this.isDenied(session.user))
      return("");
  }
  var content = param.text ? param.text : param.to;
  param = this.createLinkParam(param);
  openMarkupElement("a", param);
  res.write(content);
  closeMarkupElement("a");
}

and the new version:

function link_macro(param) {
  if (param.checkdeny == "true") {
    if (this.isDenied(session.user))
      return("");
  }
  var content = param.to;
  if (param.text) {
    content = param.text;
  } else if (param.autoTitle != "off") {
    var linkTitle = this.linkTitle(param.to);
    if (linkTitle) {
      content = linkTitle;
    }
  }
  param = this.createLinkParam(param);
  openMarkupElement("a", param);
  res.write(content);
  closeMarkupElement("a");
}

and here's linkTitle:

/**
 * return title of linked object or null if it has no
 * title.
 * so far, only titles of stories are extracted, but this
 * could be extended to also return titles of topic-frontpages,
 * external html pages (those titles would have to be
 * cached) etc.
 */
function linkTitle(url) {
   if (!url) {
      return null;
   }
   var iFirstSlash = url.indexOf("/");
   if (url.substring(0, iFirstSlash) != "stories") {
      return null;
   }
   var rest = url.substring(iFirstSlash + 1, url.length);
   var storyNum = parseInt(rest);
   if (isNaN(storyNum)) {
      return null;
   }
   var story = path.site.stories.get(String(storyNum));
   return story.getContentPart("title");
}

hope this helps. i'd love to see that in antville!

when i link to a story like this: <% site.link="stoies/59/" %> i get a link that looks like this: stories/59/ however, i'd like to have an "autoTitle" feature that automatically makes a link looking like this: next steps because this is the title of the story. of course, i can always override the default link text with the "text" parameter, but if the title of the story changes, the link becomes wrong. so, an autoTitle feature wouldn't just save me from typing in the title, it would do more. and if i want to turn that feature off because i want to display the actual URL, i want to use this: <% site.link to="stories/59/" autoTitle="off" %>

i' posted a working implementation of this feature there.

if you have topics with spaces in them, the respective stories have URLs with spaces in them, which have to be encoded. antville does this properly with "%20", but some inferior search engines convert them to "+" signs, resulting in a 404 when the user wants to follow the link.

maybe the server can be told to detect such faulty URLs and rewrite them or just redirect to the proper location? this would be trivial to do in the apache conf, but even nicer if antville did it, so everyone who downloads antville automatically gets this feature.

Is there a way to create or list stories by sub-topics.

ie...

instead of having your stories under the topics:

party pics party people party dates help general help faq

is there a way to define subtopics sop it displays as

party (which clicked shows the subtopics:) ---pics ---people ---dates

and

help (which clicked shows the subtopics:) ---general ---faq

???

-Michael

Colours. On Antville, you have a background, title, text, small text, link, active link, and visited link colour respectively. If you edit the style sheet, you can invent new classes and make up even more colours. You can have seperate colours for questions, answers, tips, alerts, dreams or stories. You can define your very own colour scheme.

Now what if your visitors could choose from one of several ready-made colour schemes and pick the one that fits their mood best? What if you had an image with a whole rainbow in it and your visitors could click anywhere to make the whole site that colour? Phew, lots of work, you might think, you'd have to define all those colour schemes.

Well, no, you don't have to. You can use colour modification parameters. You can tell your Antville site that links should be the same colour as your text, just a little brighter and a bit more saturated, more tinted. You might figure the background could be the inverse colour of the text, so there's a good contrast, but as it turns out that that doesn't look too good, you specify that it shouldn't be as saturated, but paler, almost grey. And finally you set your titles to be like the text, just a bit darker and with a slightly different hue, a little greener. That's exactly what you did when you set up your *.antville colour scheme? Sure, but if you tell the system about those considerations, you can change your text colour, and everything else will adapt accordingly. Woo-hoo!

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