finally i had some time to work on antville (thank god there are weekends ;-), and this is the result:

• i hope there is no confusion about "where will my comment appear?" anymore: there is now a seperate page for adding a toplevel-comment
• the commentcounter-macro now counts the comments, and not the threads (there has to be a reason why i called it this way ;-)
• the bigger change: authors can now define who is allowed to edit a story they created using a select-box in story-editor. 'til now there is no story-locking done so concurrent-editing-conflicts are possible ...
• choosing the userlevel of a member is now done also with a select-box instead of two checkboxes.
• stories/comments in the recently changed-list get now the first words of the text if there's no title
• the text-preview ends now with the next space reached, not exactly at the limit specified
• bugfixes included (and i hope i didn't create any new bugs ;->

Due to some changes to existing macros there might be difficulties with existing weblogs, at least i tried to keep the backwards-compatibility ... and i didn't update the documentation of macros ...

ok, so now i'm heading into barcelona's nightlife!

many thanks to michi, antville got a recently modified-list. now this is done, i'd like to propose a list of whats next (as soon as there are sections available in antville this would go to the section "todo" ;-):

1. as soon as hannes finishes dbmapping inheritance in helma migrate the db-tables "story" and "comment" to a new table named "text"
2. authors should be able to define who is allowed to edit a story they created: only admins/admins and contributors/all registered users/only themselves (=default). for comments i'd propose we keep the present way: admins are allowed to delete comments, but editing is only allowed for the authors of comments.
3. sections - admins should be able to define sections for their weblog which will appear as [weblog]/[section] with their own overview-page. authors should be able to choose if their story should also be placed in a section or just appear in the default-storypool (as it is now). this should be done with a section-editor and a dropdown-box in story-editor. it should also go hand-in-hand with a set of macros (i.e. "sectionlist") and maybe some changes in the link-macro to provide easy linking to sections ...
4. implement shortcuts for stories. shortcuts should be defined in story-editor to provide easy linking without remembering the creation-date/section of a story. one question is how the url of those stories should look like: [weblog].antville.org/stories/[story-shortcut]?
5. weblogs should be accessible with an url like [weblog-alias].antville.org (i assume this also means some changes/added functionality in helma, right?)
6. story-manager: should provide a listing of all stories with their basic parameters (title, which section, when created, who created it ...) and a basic set of actions: edit/set off- or online/delete. the basic view of the weblog for admins/contributors should be the normal users-view. instead of navigating with a calendar this storymanager should ev. provide a scroll-navigation (next 10/prev. 10).
7. create a "goodie"-manager similar to the image manager to be able to upload binaries (sounds, pdf-files etc.) and to link them in stories/comments

so, what ya think about? anything missing (of course there is, but this is just to fulfill the basic requirements ...)?

first of all, sorry for not posting for so long. stressy times and a lot of other jobs ... regarding the direction antville: i see antville basically as a framework (or, in german words, as a "lego-baukasten") for (weblog-)publishing. there is one basic principle that anville has to follow: "ease of use". because i see antville as a framework, i don't think it makes any sense to decide now if antville is going to be a system for personal weblogs or for project weblogs or whatever (i'm just hoping that people will start to play with it and "abuse" it until it fits to their needs). i don't see antville replacing the helma.org-application (at least in its first version(s)), the approach of both is much too different.

antville is a bucket of content: text, images, sounds (or other binaries). so the first step of antville has to provide an EASY WAY to create those contents, to manage and structure them and to display them according to your imagination (either dynamically or as static html-pages ftp'd to another server). on the other hand, it's critical that visitors get a good overview what changed where, what changed somewhere since their last visit, commenting is easy (and not that confusing like it is now) ...

since antville has to be more than a host-system for a bunch of isolated "content-ghettos", it really has to have some intelligent ways of linking those logs together (by exchanging headlines or whole stories, designs (including images and stuff) ...). and since nothing keeps you away from downloading helma yourself, installing antville and starting to play with it, these features must work also between antville-installations on other machines.

i strongly believe that there are ways to implement functionalities needed for a real projectlog-system into antville, but i think antville needs a flexible structure (including database, prototypes and code) first. and since antville itsself needs a project weblog, i'd say this could be version 2.

i noticed that i did not get the "create new story" link or whatever it was called after i logged in to this project log today (i had to type in the "create" url to post this message).

i think something was changed with the way how membership works - maybe intentionally so?

my other concern is that i could see that the welog was updated just recently but it's too hard to find out where (searching through all comments). we really need a list of links to recent commments, urgently.

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.