today i merged in the changes made in the branch grob_messages into the main trunk in CVS. please give it a try (but remember: this is still part of code-refacturing and therefore should be considered beta!) and report any bugs or suspicious behaviours.

In order to port antville to oracle 8i i got a problem with the GROUP BY clause of SELECT statements. It seems for oracle you must declare every columns position.

I removed the clauses out of story's and weblog's macro.js for tests.

now restarting hop i still get the same error: [HopMacro error: helma.scripting.ScriptingException: Error retrieving NodeIDs: ORA-00979: not a GROUP BY expression ]

searching the statement in the sourcecode of hop i found the GROUP BY clause only in Relations.java which doesn't import FESI. At a first view this can't throw a ScriptingException.

someone can put light on this phenomenon?

thanks in advance roland

here's a list of (missing) features or things that should change in antville as a result of an evening in a "gastgarten" where hns and i talked about the rough "roadmap" towards antville 1.0. i hope i got everything right and didn't forget something, and sorry for not posting it sooner. the names in brackets indicate those responsible for implementing.

• Names of DB-Columns/Tables will be prefixed (or renamed to avoid usage of reserved names), plus adding SQL-scripts for other databases (at least oracle) [robert]
• the content of a story (which is now stored in separate columns, "TITLE" and "TEXT") will be stored as XML in just *one* column in the database. the reason is that stories can be "extended" with new parts (eg. lead-text, abstract, link ...) by simply modifying the form for creating a new story (input-tags could be named ie. "content:title"). eventually the story-table in database is extended with a single column containing the plain text of the whole story-content for keyword-search [hns]
• the language of system-messages changes according to system-language or weblog-language. all system-messages are basically skins that are defined in separate language-files (one for each) and can be reached at app.data[language-code]. this is already in CVS, for more see this posting.
• antclick will include McCoi as database instead of HSQLdb [hns]
• antville-setup: antville will provide a browser-based setup, meaning that parameters (like enabling/disabling auto-cleanup, language-settings, directories etc.) will be changeable without having to fiddle around in app.properties [robert, already in process].
• enable/disable posting of comments for each story
• two new macros: one for embedding the recent n stories located in a topic, and the other one for embedding a story/poll with a given id. with these macros users can customize the frontpage of their weblog.
• navigation issues: see hns's proposal for details

plus some ideas that could be part of version 1.0, but 'til now are not more than brief concepts:

• theme-support: every owner/admin of a weblog can export the design (meaning skins and those images referenced in skins) into a "theme", which then can be downloaded and imported by others. importing themes will support "theme-preview" (meaning that one can safely test a theme within the own weblog).
• integration of PARSS-functionality in antville: the idea behind is that users should be able to subscribe RSS-feeds which are displayed as "simple weblogs" in antville. from there one can easily use an RSS-item as basis for a new post in a weblog. this is still subject to discuss (tobi and hns can tell a lot more about that).

all of the above features are still open to discussion. and of course everybody is welcome to contribute (ideas/code).

Id like to add a feature request to the renderTextPreview function - Im using the text_macro with limiter in the story preview skin for the reason to make long postings possible without messing up the übersichtlichkeit of the frontpage. but of course when the tags are stripped automatically then its not that übersichtlich either... (and, is there an english word for übersichtlich? ;)

This is a proposal for restructuring the way Antville handles site navigation, i.e. displaying links within a weblog for various groups of users. Here is a list of proposed changes:

1. Leave the current weblog.navigation macro as is to avoid breaking current antville.org weblogs.
2. Directly embed navigation elements that are the same for all users into the main page skin.
3. Create a new macro called "weblog.adminlinks" that only display links for contributors and admins. Points 2. and 3. solve two problems:
   • it makes it possible to separate basic site navigation from navigation links displayed only for contributors and administrators
   • it makes basic site navigation easier to customize
4. Replace the "search" link with an embedded search field (already discussed and agreed upon here)
5. Replace the "topics" link with a macro that displays an inlined list of all topics (imagine, no more links to empty topics page, and new topics would automagically appear in sidebar!)
6. Move the "polls" link to the links only displayed for contributors and admins. The reason for this is that I consider polls to be building blocks similar to images and goodies which would be displayed to ordinary users only when linked or embedded from a story or comment or skin.

Thus, the site navigation code that would be directly embedded into the main page skin would look something like this (in pseudo-macro-code, so to say):

<% weblog.link to="main" text="home" %><br />
<% weblog.topiclist %><br />
<!-- insert more static links here if you want -->
<% weblog.adminlinks %><br />

<!-- um, maybe we should write a macro 
for the search box? -->
<form action="<%this.url%>search"><input name="q"
value="<% request.q encoding="form" %>"><input
type="submit" value="search"></form>

whatever.antville.org/?xyz leads the a "This server is temporarily unavailable. Please check back later." message which is pretty interesting (came across it as I had troubles with a proxy and wanted to refresh the page that way). Not too serious problem though ;)