i'm happy to announce that the first release candidate of Antville 1.0 is now available for download (.tar.gz and .zip).

There's also an updated version 1.0pre5 of Antclick available (.tar.gz and .zip). Those who have Antclick pre4 already running should follow these upgrade instructions.

Together with this i also put an up-to-date version of the application documentation online (you can download it in .tar.gz or .zip format).

Please give it a try. If you find any bugs post them here or - even better - in our bugtracking system. Please also post a short note here if you didn't find any bugs or strange behaviour since this is the only way i can estimate the level of testing pre1 has got. If everything goes well the final release of Antville 1.0 will be out within one week.

Upgrading is pretty easy as it just means to copy all data from the old Antclick to the new one:

1. backup your old Antclick (eg. by copying it to a safe place)
2. unpack the new Antclick distribution file somewhere on your disk (please mind that Antclick might not run if it's placed into a directory whose name contains spaces!) and copy the following subdirectories from your old Antclick into the new one:
3. data/ (this directory contains all database-files)
4. static/files/ into the static/-directory of your new Antclick
5. all subdirectories of static/images/ (without the images-directory itself!) into static/images/ of your new Antclick
6. db/ (this directory contains eg. the system preferences of your antville installation) into the installation directory of your new Antclick.

If you modified Helma's server.properties copy them into your new Antclick directory too. That's it.

almost didn't trust my fevering eyes... have to praise you like i should!

¡felizidades hombre! it sounds like fiesta to me ¿no?

It absolutely rocks!

my full name accepted as username (including whitespace and 'ö'), much improved empty-weblog introduction page, even more work done on the story editor, everything working smoothly...

kudos. I'm really lookin forward to 1.0 final.

I congratulate the dev team to this daring feat of finally having all these important bug and performance issues sorted out so nicely!

I'd like to humbly suggest that version 1.0 would, now that this work is done, also be a good opportunity to update the default skins, i.e. introduce valid XHTML, dispense with superfluous table markup, make proper use of <h3>adline and other markup, use dashed borders instead of the pixel-imagelettes, etc. This would enhance accessibility and cut down the size of transmitted code, which in turn reduces bandwidth usage and loading times.

A proper CSS-based layout would also reduce nasty glitches like the whole page's layout exploding because of one wide comment. (The ultimate remedy for this would of course be a proper line breaking algorithm.)

I don't know if you guys would be willing to make that change (/now), but if so, I'd like to help. I already did some research into this and could, for example, reformat those skins to resemble the current layout (i.e. header with image across the top, menus to the right). What do you think?

PS: The new documentation kicks ass, thanks!

running absolutly smooth on a W2K Server :) thanks, great job.

only trouble was that i had the antclick first unzipped in a directory which contains spaces in its path, and then the datasource could not be detected. (i already mentioned this here) if anyone else can confirm this behaviour i would file a bug report (for Helma).