to start the discussion i proposed concerning further aspects of yawn (yet another weblog nanny) i propose the following:

let's discuss where antville could be heading to. is it thought to be of use only for personal weblogs or should antville be able to really manage a group of people developing a cool weblog tool with helme? should it be able to replace the helma.org application?

what are the "operational areas" of antville? what kind of data could i manage with it? which tasks could antville help me with? how would i work with antville, then?

deriving from the results we then can argue about what features antville needs to accomplish the appropriate tasks.

this could be a suggestion like "antville needs a personalised view on the events of a project log - i should be able to see what has happened in the meantime since i logged off the last time according to my personal preferences." (which is meant to be a serious proposal from my side, actually).

finally, we can talk about how (and who is) to implement those features.

this is definitely something we should make up our mind right now, otherwise a lot of confusing stuff will be implemented.

for example, i didn't really get the point why a weblogger would need something like "topics" with different layouts.

so what do we want?

• "simple" mulituser blogging with some neat extra features (like antville looks right now)
• a weblog + knowledgemanagement system (not good idea; don't mess with the big sharks, i.e. Vanilla :-)
• a content-management-system which would btw substitute something like helma.org (not good either; a open-source CMS with helma could be/ should be a nice, but pretty big project on its own; chris once suggested sthg. like that)

i would therefor strongly prefer first option. neat extra features could be an integrated dingsbox (image gallerys), simultaneous reading of multiple weblogs, xml-rpc interface, and much more.

+1 on highlighting those things which changed since the last log in.

I can reply to michi's comment but not to the "top-level" story. anyway ...

What's the purpose of a project weblog? To support a project you will say, and right you are. So what's a project? A coordinated effort of multiple people to reach one or several goals, to keep this discussion short and fruitful.

Allora: One of things I've learned in my oh-so-glorious time as Wirtschaftsstudent was that if goals are to be saved from a dubious'n'diffuse future they have to be 'SMART' - simple, measurable, attractive, rewarding, timely.

But before they can be SMART, they have to be visible. I, the casual visitor to a.org, can't see at first glance what the current direction of the project is. Assume that I have 2 hours of leisure time I want to contribute to Antville - where do I start, what - I don't want to spend the better part of those 2 hours reading through all of the backlog and some of the List postings as well ...

Therefore my proposal:

To be an effective project-supporting tool, the weblog home page should be divided into four parts:

A. project overview - a simple table consisting of 'goal id', e.g. 'XML-RPC interface', responsible/s, priority, color-coded state of completion, e.g. '95% done, to be merged back into main tree', B. RFCs - well thought-out concepts one is proud to request comments for C. semi-daily progress reports from one of the people most involved - just a few lines to keep the casual passerby up-to-date D. wild brainstorms, for inspiration and amusement

section A. should be maintainable by the people who work on individual items themselves, items are sorted by state of completion (green on top).

so I guess this posting qualifies as contender for section D.

whadya think?