a nice evening talking with hannes brought up a bucket full of ideas what to do next with antville. What you think about?

1. authors should be able to define shortcuts for stories. those stories can also be reached via "/stories/[shortcut]" (to enable linking to permanent stories i.e. in skins

2. either display offline-stories in a different way than those stories online or create a "story-manager" where one could easily get an overview about the status of the stories. right now as an admin you'll see even offline-stories as they would be online, but you're the only one who can reach them ;-)

3. implement "topics" ("sections"? "departments"?). think of this as a way to structure stories inside a weblog and to get the possibility to somehow "categorize" stories. so one could open up a topic named "software development" and create stories inside. topics would have their own overview-page.

4. remove the color- & font-definitions from weblog and put them into a new "style"-prototype. each weblog and each topic could then have it's own style-object, so topics must not have the same appearence as the rest of the weblog.

5. allow overwriting of the main-skin (which is now in prototype "global") within "weblog", "topic", "story" etc. so any of these prototypes can have a different appearence (i.e. one could use different background-images for the frontpage and some of the topics)

6. authors should be able to write a "lead-text" for a story, which then would be displayed on the frontpage instead of the whole story (the lead would link to the full text of the story). if a story has no lead-text, it will be displayed with it's full text on the frontpage.

7. implement a "goodie pool" where one can upload any content in binary form (i.e. sound files, pdf's ...) and handle these goodies similar to the image-handling right now.

8. the skin-editor should on the one hand only allow those skins editable that make sense to be edited, and also allow the creation of "custom skins" that one can embed in other (default-)skins with the existing skin-macro.

9. invitation: a weblog-admin should be able to invite users to participate within this weblog (as an admin or contributor). if the user is not registered already, the account will be created and an invitation-mail will be sent to the user (including username & password).

10. each weblog should be reachable with "[weblog-alias].antville.org" instead of "antville.org/[weblog-alias]".

11. antville should completely be language-sensitive, so one could change the language i.e. to german and not only the system-messages, but also the form-element-descriptions et.al. should be presented in the german language.