finally i made it (uff!): a lot has changed, mostly structural changes inside the application, but some things are visible:

• restructured navigation-skins (they're additional now, so usernavigation is the most basic, and admin- and contribnavigation-skins are added according to user-rights). which means adding a navigation-link for all users simply means to edit one skin, not three ;-)
• restructured story-skins: there's only one skin for story-display left, and it's embedded in comment-, main- and preview-skin
• in weblog-preferences you now can define the small-font (including it's size and color)
• localisation in weblog-preferences is now done with one dropdown-box instead of forcing users to learn ISO-codes ;-)
• modifyable birthdate was removed from preferences (it seems that nobody has used it, so it was a nice try ...) the birthdate of a weblog is now it's create-date.
• for formatting timestamps each weblog has now two choices - "long" and "short". i didn't implement the "custom" dateformat since i couldn't find a nice way to do it 'til now, but i hope the choices offered are sufficient for now. all macros dealing with time now have two additional options: format="long" or format="short", plus still the ability for everyone to format timestamps with a custom format-pattern in a skin
• entering an invalid timestamp-format now doesn't lead to an ugly error-message (but you'll see if something is wrong).
• stories now have a "link me"-link
• header.skin is gone. it's included in page.skin
• editor.skin of weblog is gone too. all editor-pages now use the page.skin (it was just a try to save performance with having some lighter pages - i.e. without a recently modified-box and without calendar)
• there's a "create a story"-link now in the main navigation (so you don't have to go to storypool to get the link there)
• i tried to clean up redirects (although there's still some stuff left to do). so i.e. when you create a story that's offline, you'll get redirected to storymanager, if it's online you'll jump into the main view of the story.

but most of the changes were internal:

• i tried to give all objectFunctions a defined interface - all of the stuff needed by a function now must be passed as arguments to it. and - holy moly! - i started to add comments to the functions, at least some that should tell more about input/output ... but it's still not finished ...
• all securityFunctions now demand a user-object passed as argument, which should make them more independent.

i hope this makes the internal structure of antville a bit clearer, but due to some of these changes i'm pretty sure that there are new bugs (although i tested it). so please be patient ;-) i've added a db-patch for adding (and renaming) columns, and i apologize if my changes lead to cvs-conflicts on all contributor's sides. and as always: thanks a lot to all the contributions, ideas and responses! and of course: all these changes apply only to the antville-version in cvs, not to the version of antville.org (sorry, but we'll move to the new version sooooon)