a nice evening talking with hannes brought up a bucket full of ideas what to do next with antville. What you think about?

1. authors should be able to define shortcuts for stories. those stories can also be reached via "/stories/[shortcut]" (to enable linking to permanent stories i.e. in skins

2. either display offline-stories in a different way than those stories online or create a "story-manager" where one could easily get an overview about the status of the stories. right now as an admin you'll see even offline-stories as they would be online, but you're the only one who can reach them ;-)

3. implement "topics" ("sections"? "departments"?). think of this as a way to structure stories inside a weblog and to get the possibility to somehow "categorize" stories. so one could open up a topic named "software development" and create stories inside. topics would have their own overview-page.

4. remove the color- & font-definitions from weblog and put them into a new "style"-prototype. each weblog and each topic could then have it's own style-object, so topics must not have the same appearence as the rest of the weblog.

5. allow overwriting of the main-skin (which is now in prototype "global") within "weblog", "topic", "story" etc. so any of these prototypes can have a different appearence (i.e. one could use different background-images for the frontpage and some of the topics)

6. authors should be able to write a "lead-text" for a story, which then would be displayed on the frontpage instead of the whole story (the lead would link to the full text of the story). if a story has no lead-text, it will be displayed with it's full text on the frontpage.

7. implement a "goodie pool" where one can upload any content in binary form (i.e. sound files, pdf's ...) and handle these goodies similar to the image-handling right now.

8. the skin-editor should on the one hand only allow those skins editable that make sense to be edited, and also allow the creation of "custom skins" that one can embed in other (default-)skins with the existing skin-macro.

9. invitation: a weblog-admin should be able to invite users to participate within this weblog (as an admin or contributor). if the user is not registered already, the account will be created and an invitation-mail will be sent to the user (including username & password).

10. each weblog should be reachable with "[weblog-alias].antville.org" instead of "antville.org/[weblog-alias]".

11. antville should completely be language-sensitive, so one could change the language i.e. to german and not only the system-messages, but also the form-element-descriptions et.al. should be presented in the german language.

1. authors should be able to define shortcuts for stories.

2. either display offline-stories in a different way

who is seeing these stories right now (admin, registered, .. ?)

3. implement "topics"

??? the trouble with topics is, that you often don't know what topic your story is about. and maybe it covers two topics. i think the personal log works better than the topic log.

maybe its a better idea to connect differnt logs, or to personalize (my)Antville, where a user(reader) sees his favourit logs (which would be the topics)

the more i think about this, topics are not a good idea to me. it would be a lot better for the antville site if people have to link to other logs, rather then build there own getto (a site within the site). a user could read a lot of blogs, with his own skin. or sHe could collect a few blogs, and publish this collection, what would not be very far away from the topics frame.

??? please comment

4. remove the color- & font-definitions from weblog

lets get rid of them

6. authors should be able to write a "lead-text" for a story

why not just display the first 200 chars. at least as another option.

7)8) +1

9. invitation

i think there is a lot of potential by registering to a weblog. for readers and contributers.

1. • Shortcuts - nice gimmick, but not vital
2. • story-manager is definitely a great idea
3. • topics would be excellent. this should work in a way that you don't have to assign a topic to a story, but if you do, gives you the possibility to view all stories of that topic with a mouseklick. with a new macro that automatically generates a list of topics... great feature!
4. • 5. • style & skins - sounds sensible, but we have to be careful so things don't get too complex for simple users.
5. • lead - great idea.
6. • goodie-pool - absolutely yes!
7. • restrict access to skins /costum skins - could be hard to determine which skins make sense to be edited ;-) as for costum skins, its again a matter of not making things too complicated...
8. • invitation - nice gimmick!
9. • url - would be great!
10. • language - also great, but think of a panic-button (if user tries out some languages and can't read form elements in his settings any more - he needs a big red button "reset to english" ;-)

all ideas are good and most of them really necessary. manila and blogger (and many other weblog / news tools) proove that.

i could add now static rendering via ftp and rss output as some more features already known from those services.

however, i wonder if an tville could not improve the weblog tool itself with a different approach.

imho, especially the skin features are neat but nevertheless overextend the simple weblogger (rememerb: it should be easy to do it).

all skins certainly should be available for those who really dare to fiddle around for a while. but i assume that most people feel rather stressed than satisfied with 20 or more layout parts to edit (ms word effect).

would be cool to find a better, more simple mechanism to achieve a perfect layout. any thoughts on that?

when does "reply to this comm" appear and when not? is there an inconsistance?? can just one person reply to a comment???

and: panic? all right, pero just "last saved" would be more neutral. and gives you the feeling of: tranquila, ni problema.

(i could not reply to my own copmment / roberts comment)

ad 3) it's not that i don't like the idea of "sections", but on the other hand i learned to love hensos simple aproaches. henso.com works so nice, because there is just one page (in general), no extra stuff, no wondering what link to click, just the pure blogging idea.

i wrote a simple multi-chapter-blogger on knallgrau.at with multiple users(contributers), and what i learned from it, that it was hard for peaople to decide, where to post there stuff. that doesn't occure when you are blogging on your own.

but when you(we) find a way that it's realy just an option it will work.

what do you think about the ideas to link multiple blogs ? (favourits, best of, webring, ...)

and maybe view them with your own personal skin.

weblogname.antville.org is now implemented from the Apache side (example), but the intra-weblog URLs won't yet work.

if i use this??