we had a discussion about this issue last week. as i said before and as the implementation of my sites proves, the story.comment url is pointless.

uh, i considered that discussion merely being about login and stuff and i think i added some more points (that certainly could lead in the same direction as desired last week).

No, let's get rid of "Antville - " in the title! I don't think it's normal that a website should have the name of the underlying technology or the website hoster in the title!

maybe the server messages could be made editable/localizable. one xml file with all server output should do the job.

I'm afraid that won't happen "while we're at it". But I agree it would be a desirable feature.

The way this is usually and best handled is with properties files, not XML. Maybe we could use the Helma skin feature to parameterize localized messages.

oh, i didn't talk about the implemantation issue. i thought an xml file as interface is fine for customization, because it's an advanced feature. you can put the file into the yet to be created skin path. how to parse and convert the elements into properties is an entirely different story.

but now back to the initial discussion. i made another observation: why is the creation of thumbnails an option? if you ask me, you can remove the checkbox. i don't know any reason why someone doesn't want thumbnails.

first, congrats to p3k new and shiny ;-)

ad 1) +1 ad 2) yes, i know. i think best would be to remove the default add-on-text of this macro (so that it would display per default just the number of comments), and either add a linkto-option or leave it plain as it is. ad 3) i agree with you: placing "Antville" plus the weblog-name into the default-pageskins would be much better (so there's just one place to remove it if wanted). And henso, i don't think it's that "bad" to build in the name of the hoster/technology into the page-title if we make it easy to remove it. ad 4) yes, i think so too ad 5) i'm not sure if this is really needed, and i think this would boost up the complexity of antville's macro-structure even more. ad 6) absolutely. in the moment helma is capable to manage "themes", this will be an important issue (and i really like henso's idea).

regarding server-messages: i once tried to customize server-messages with java property-files, but i could not get it working without adding these properties-files as .jar-files into classpath (which to me is pretty clumsy). nevertheless, i'd like to see this split up into two portions: first, antville should be able to localize server-messages depending on the language-definition in weblog-preferences (that's why i tried this stuff out), and second: yes, i think those who are really advanced users of antville should be able to customize these messages. anyway, this is a major thing (and pretty complex to implement).