a part of my job includes the reworking of a big institutional website. the site is based on a way too complex and too expensive cough knowledge management system. i'm thinking of gradually replacing it by antville and helma. my basic idea is to build a website that works on two levels. one is the chronologically ordered frontpage (weblog) and the other is a well structured archive (the actual site).

here is a list of the features i would like to add:

1. the most important and most tricky one would be virtual directories, i.e. a way to assign arbitrary paths to every story. the main task is probably the development of a good gui and macros for breadcrumb navigation, the site outline etc.

2. i would like to define who is allowed to set stories online and assign paths to them. for example, contributors can submit stories and they remain offline till the content managers reviews them.

3. there was some talk here about a macro to include stories. this would be cool to add editable content to the templates.

4. multiple templates would be cool. i suppose one for the frontpage (with calendar and recent mods) and a simple one for the rest of the site should do.

i guess the last two points are also interesting for regular weblogs whereas the first two aspects clearly go further.

is the code for the structured content on helma.org available and can it be merged with antville? is anyone else interested in these features?

I'm pretty much with you regarding the Antville as a generic CMS for small sites. Weblogs are great, but we've got 80% of what it takes for a simple generic CMS already, so if we go the extra 20%, the kinds of websites that can be implemented on Antville will expand by 80% (or some such ;-). What I'm working on in this regard right now is custom content properties for stories. Basically, stories will soon be able to hold any number and kind of text items without adding columns to the relational db by simply encoding the text as XML in the db.

Regarding the virtual directory space you're talking about: I'm a bit ambivalent on that. On the one hand it's nice to have the possibility to add hierarchical structure, but the management of such a space tends to be non-trivial (for example, on helma.org we lack a good way of moving stories around). Also, reflecting hierarchical information in the story URL will result in broken links when stories are moved around, so there is something that speaks for keeping the /stories/[storyid] URLs we currently have (it's not a problem to add hierarchical structure without reflecting it in the URL-space, though). So my point is: hierarchical structures are great, but we need to think it out really well before adding it to Antville, which has a very nice and clean structure now.

ad 1) i once did something like that, but it was based on "keywords" and not virtual directories (meaning that every story was associated with one or more keywords, which formed a "navigation-tree"). which was a really complex thing to implement.

ad 2) i hate workflow :-) seriously, also this is mainly a ui-problem (and maybe one of growing preferences to define): if a contributor doesn't have the right to publish stories, the online/offline-dropdown shouldn't appear and so on ... so while this feature doesn't look like hard to implement, i think it has a lot of side-effects ...

ad 3) this is planned for antville V1 (sooooon ...), together with a macro to embed the latest n stories in a specified topic.

ad 4) i assume you're talking about the main page-skin. now the rendering of this skin is part of antville's code, so adding this feature is quite hard. and i'm not sure if this is really necessary ... nevertheless, one thing planned for V1 is "custom skins" (but keep in mind: it's planned, no guarantee)

i feel very awkward of antville becoming a cms (even if it's just "for the rest of us"). might be that just the word is such a big turn-off.

however, especially the second point in the list is one that really would trouble me. sounds like dropping the "personal" attribute to go into some corporate direction again where workflow is all that matters. a website is not a weblog and a weblog tool is not a cms (and if antville is 80% close to one i think that's already enuff). consider me watching this from safe distance. ;->

i'm pretty interested in this.

1. we have a cms based on helma, but it's a cms, not a weblog (and it's commercial) with hirachical structures
2. but i'm looking for a weblog solution for www.fachschaftarchitektur.at (maybe based on antville), but would also need the possibility to have some structured content.
3. can't find your email .... so please send me yours to matthias#knallgrau.at