finally i made it (uff!): a lot has changed, mostly structural changes inside the application, but some things are visible:

• restructured navigation-skins (they're additional now, so usernavigation is the most basic, and admin- and contribnavigation-skins are added according to user-rights). which means adding a navigation-link for all users simply means to edit one skin, not three ;-)
• restructured story-skins: there's only one skin for story-display left, and it's embedded in comment-, main- and preview-skin
• in weblog-preferences you now can define the small-font (including it's size and color)
• localisation in weblog-preferences is now done with one dropdown-box instead of forcing users to learn ISO-codes ;-)
• modifyable birthdate was removed from preferences (it seems that nobody has used it, so it was a nice try ...) the birthdate of a weblog is now it's create-date.
• for formatting timestamps each weblog has now two choices - "long" and "short". i didn't implement the "custom" dateformat since i couldn't find a nice way to do it 'til now, but i hope the choices offered are sufficient for now. all macros dealing with time now have two additional options: format="long" or format="short", plus still the ability for everyone to format timestamps with a custom format-pattern in a skin
• entering an invalid timestamp-format now doesn't lead to an ugly error-message (but you'll see if something is wrong).
• stories now have a "link me"-link
• header.skin is gone. it's included in page.skin
• editor.skin of weblog is gone too. all editor-pages now use the page.skin (it was just a try to save performance with having some lighter pages - i.e. without a recently modified-box and without calendar)
• there's a "create a story"-link now in the main navigation (so you don't have to go to storypool to get the link there)
• i tried to clean up redirects (although there's still some stuff left to do). so i.e. when you create a story that's offline, you'll get redirected to storymanager, if it's online you'll jump into the main view of the story.

but most of the changes were internal:

• i tried to give all objectFunctions a defined interface - all of the stuff needed by a function now must be passed as arguments to it. and - holy moly! - i started to add comments to the functions, at least some that should tell more about input/output ... but it's still not finished ...
• all securityFunctions now demand a user-object passed as argument, which should make them more independent.

i hope this makes the internal structure of antville a bit clearer, but due to some of these changes i'm pretty sure that there are new bugs (although i tested it). so please be patient ;-) i've added a db-patch for adding (and renaming) columns, and i apologize if my changes lead to cvs-conflicts on all contributor's sides. and as always: thanks a lot to all the contributions, ideas and responses! and of course: all these changes apply only to the antville-version in cvs, not to the version of antville.org (sorry, but we'll move to the new version sooooon)

i can see all the stuff, but i can´t use it so far. por favor, es posible to activate adele??? a little bit more than soooooon :)) motz - a user sin server

That sounds really really great, Robert. Can't wait to check it out (on hopdev.helma.org).

robert, i am totally impressed! as far as i have looked at your changes and how they work in antville this must have been a gigantesque effort of work. and it's done so well and works so smoothly. huge compliments and a big thank you from my side.

Really nice. Does this mean antville 1.0 is almost finished? I noticed some problems, though.

-No default settings for the small fonts are assigned to existing sites, which yields to loads of errors on the console. Same with the main-edit skin and maybe some others. They are empty, but antville does not use the default value. (Not sure if I made a mistake.)

-I could not find a skin for <% this.membership %> in the skin editor. Maybe you can put it into the skin for the logged in member?

-Are you planning a minimal skin editor for the front page? I would like to be able to control which people can create sites on my antville server.

can you change the sender of the confirmation emails to the owner of the weblog? and it's "online for 167 days".