this means, i want to have a macro topic.description (or topic.meta or something) that inserts a snippet of html which i can define in my topic manager. for example, when the topic is foo, then topic.description returns "<span class="bar">these stories deal with the ancient art of foo. if you don't know what foo is, maybe you'd like to visit <a href="theancientartoffoo.com<">the ancient art of foo<a> first.</span>" or something. then i insert the macro into my "topic page" skin before the storylist macro and voilà! there's my customized topic frontpage.

update: i just implemented the createtime-link myself. boy, this was easy! i mean, this was the first time i tinkered with the antville code, i hadn't even edited a .js file before, and all it took me was 10 minutes. the code has even the rarely seen 3-spaces-indents, just as i like it. guys, i love you.

maybe you'd like to have a look at my implementation and tell me what you think. i post it in a comment, this story already consumes enough space on the frontpage :-)

Have you tried implementing it? If not, why not?

in story/macros.js:

/**
 * macro rendering createtime of story
 */

function createtime_macro(param) {
   if (param.as == "editor") {
      if (this.createtime)
         param.value = formatTimestamp(
            this.createtime,
            "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm");
      else
         param.value = formatTimestamp(new Date(),
            "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm");
      param.name = "createtime";
      renderInputText(param);
   } else {
      if (!this.createtime)
         return;
      var dateStr = formatTimestamp(
         this.createtime,param.format);
      var dateLink = this.site.href() +
         formatTimestamp(this.createtime,
         "yyyyMMdd");
      if (param.as == "link") {
         res.write("<a href=\"" + dateLink + "\">");
      }
      res.write(dateStr);
      if (param.as == "link") {
         res.write("</a>");
      }
   }
}

the format of the link is hardcoded, maybe this is a bad thing and i should've called a function that gives me the format?

another thing that could use some improvement is the placement of the anchor tags -- they include the time portion of the date, which is technically incorrect, since we link to the whole day.

but i guess it's better than nothing, maybe you'd like to include it in your codebase?