today, i modified the rss output and the commentcounter macro. rss just got a check if the story title is not null (to avoid it being rendered as string "null"). this is due to the story extension features which allows to leave out the title property completely

the commentcounter macro got an additional "as" parameter. with it one can determine whether the output should be rendered as links, generally (ie. no matter how little comments there are) or as text (no links at all). if param.as is missing, only comment amounts > 0 will be rendered as links. is it now smart enough to fulfill any needs?

addendum: recent changes today in page.skins. stylesheets and javascript codes from now on are being linked to.

i just commited some changes into CVS:

• users now can decide (when registering or editing their profile) if their email-address may appear public or not. if they decide it should *not* be public it will also not appear on any administrative page (like the members-page for admins of a weblog).
• users can now also enter an email-address as url in their profile, which will be prefixed with "mailto:" if missing (a partial implementation of this request).

I also modified the current version of antville running here on antville.org: email-addresses are generally not displayed, not even on administrative pages.

(short note to project members: i'm offline for the next week since i'll be on the road to vienna).

i decided to merge my additions and modifications in the helmaville branch with the main branch. here's a short list of changes i implemented so far:

1. storylist macro
2. custom clipping in renderTextPreview
3. the title property of stories and comments is kept along with its corresponding value in the xml content
4. new doctype / document header in page.skin for xhtml conformance
5. created a new createtime_macro() function in the hopobject prototype and removed it from at least four specific prototypes.
6. shortcuts (improved but still experimental)

moreover, i am currently going through this list and strike out feature by feature (as far as i feel able to implement it):

1. changed explicit and verbose date format parameter to "short" in comment skins
2. default title in new comment ("Re: previous title"; experimental)
3. extended the topic macro to support generation of topic icons, links or simple plain output of the topic's name

i hope i did not forget anything... (and that everything works and nothing else is broken)

I just commited a patch that adds some of the missing skins to the skin manager main page. The addes skins are:

• single topic main page
• topic overview main page
• story manager main page
• site search form
• site search result skin

Have a look at the CVS diff. The patch was contributed by Mr. Arno of Murmel Comics fame - thanks Arno!

is there any macro that makes it possible for the user to send stories via email? would be a nice feature...

if you modify or add markup to any skin please check if it does not hurt the xhtml specs either by following these simple rules or even better by using the w3c html validator – at least the part you have modified/added, since not every skin has been transformed to xhtml, yet.

thanks for listening.

btw. up to now, i was validating against xhtml 1.0 only which already resulted in a bunch of error messages for most pages. now there's also the option to validate against version 1.1 which returns even worse results... should we do it with 1.1, anyway?

... I would love to see in future-versions of Antville:

1.) Additional navigation in Fullstory view: "next story" & "last story" buttons

2.) The possibility to render the stories in topic-view different from the frontpage - when a visitor choses a topic from the list, I'd like to present him a list of story-titles instead of the complete stories (or is there a way to do that & i haven't found it?)