the only thing one needs to take care of if is not to be able to destroy a weblog by creating a 'bad' topic. Wouldn't an exclude list help, to prevent topic names that are used for hac-files? As for topics, I think there is lots of customization work necessary there anyway - e.g. one might want to display the recent stories (only title and date) sorted by topics on the sidebar, or have an introduction text for each topic before the complete list of all stories in this topic (similar to the hostarea on the fm4-website). But I know this is something that moves antville away a bit from a blog tool - but personally I find this (generally: being able to style all the pages as topics, referrers, mostread etc., e.g. getting rid of being forced to display the content with 400px width in order not to brake the layout) more relevant than the color picker ;)

But I know this is something that moves antville away a bit from a blog tool

You have a too narrow idea of "blog". Maybe this is pollution from Blogger.com, where blogging stands for "not able to do very much". We don't have that doctrine here.

but personally I find this (generally: being able to style all the pages as topics, referrers, mostread etc., e.g. getting rid of being forced to display the content with 400px width in order not to brake the layout) more relevant than the color picker

Any code is welcome and will be examined benevolently.

no, in my eyes antville should be far more than blogger provides - I just wasn't sure about the general idea of antville (do we want to add cms-features or do we want to make it as simple as possible?). As for code, if I happen to have some spare time in the next weeks Ill take care of that. But no promise there, unfortunately.

do we want to add cms-features or do we want to make it as simple as possible?

The nice thing is that we may be to have both - keeping the interface as simple as it is (or maybe improving it here and there) and adding flexibility via macro/skin customizing.

this is where i agree when it comes to the general issue of "is antville a blog tool or a cms. i like the simplicity (especially when it comes to the interface) of antville but macro customizing seems very nice.

having different macros for almost every need, makes the tool customizable yet easy to handle.

this is also where i see the need for "skins for choice", discussed elsewhere.