i just updated antville, now:

• the lastupdate-timestamp of the weblog is updated when a story is changed/deleted or a comment is posted (should give a better impression where something is happening)
• if the weblog is offline, one is redirected to the login-page (there is a new function called isPublic() in weblog)
• if the archive of the weblog is disabled, the calendar is disabled too and it's not possible to step back by guessing urls ...
• contributor-navigation is only displayed when the user is logged in (and is a contributor or "users may contribute" is enabled in weblog-preferences)
• "appPath" (in apps.properties) is not needed anymore (thanks to hannes!), i didn't know that app.skinfiles[prototype][skin-name] contains the source of the skinfile.

we already discussed the roles of contributors and users before, but i still think that the current implementations is not flexible enough, and that there will be soon scenarios where it won't be sufficient.

right now there is just a single property ("user may contribute"), but if you take a closer look you can identify the following actions which need to be granted or restricted to users:

• accessing a weblog (i.e. reading stories+comments)
• writing stories
• editing their own stories
• deleting their own stories
• editing other people's stories
• deleting other people's stories
• writing comments
• editing their own comments
• deleting their own comments
• editing other people's comments
• deleting other people's comments
• upload images
• remove images

the Admin of a Weblog should always have all those rights, and can also modify the weblog preferences and the skins.

so there are 3 user groups remaining:

• contributors
• registered users
• anonymous users

3 groups times 13 rights = 39 new properties for weblog !?!

looks complicated but should be really eeasy to implement, and is also the "cleanest" solution.

in order to make life easy for weblog-creators there should be a reasonable default setting for all those rights.

to start the discussion i proposed concerning further aspects of yawn (yet another weblog nanny) i propose the following:

let's discuss where antville could be heading to. is it thought to be of use only for personal weblogs or should antville be able to really manage a group of people developing a cool weblog tool with helme? should it be able to replace the helma.org application?

what are the "operational areas" of antville? what kind of data could i manage with it? which tasks could antville help me with? how would i work with antville, then?

deriving from the results we then can argue about what features antville needs to accomplish the appropriate tasks.

this could be a suggestion like "antville needs a personalised view on the events of a project log - i should be able to see what has happened in the meantime since i logged off the last time according to my personal preferences." (which is meant to be a serious proposal from my side, actually).

finally, we can talk about how (and who is) to implement those features.