the following has changed:

• implemented kris suggestions here and here (thanks, kris!). this should ease image- and file-upload a lot since it's not necessary anymore to specify a name - antville will construct one (this also works with hensos get-image-by-url-function). if a name is already in use, antville will add a number to the name and increase it until an unused name is found. also the checkbox for creating a thumbnail was removed: thumbnails are now created automatically if the width or height of an image are > 100 pixel.
• it's now possible to enable/disable comments for each story. i reinvoked the until then deprecated commentlink-macro because the link to "place your comment" now disappears if comments are disabled (same with the comment-counter). still wondering if it makes sense to be able to limit comments to contributors, admins ... (btw.: there's a new dbpatch that enables discussions for all existing stories)
• the input-macro moved from hopobject to global (it never made sense there) and echoes request-values by default).

still to be done: couldn't solve the nasty upload-error reported by smi and several others. any ideas out there?

thanks a lot. i just merged your updates with my current helmaville working copy and the new features really rock (btw. the image grabber by hns, too!).

i'd like to make one tiny suggestion while you just have been at the renderTextPreview function:

how about adding a parameter "filler" (or the like, i am sure there are better names) that is added to the preview if (and only if) the original text exceeds the character limit param?

this would mean that also macro calls do not use suffix=" ..." but e.g. filler=" ..."

the effect would be that texts which do not need to be cut off don't appear with the three dots.

what do you think?

first off, thanks for these features.

apparently these errors only occur when you scale some strange gifs. maybe you can simply use a default tumbnail for "preview not available" in those cases where you can't create a thumbnail.

Great.

Regarding the image upload error: The reduceColors() function which causes the error is from the JIMI library. I can probably replace this by something out of the standard Java class library, but I'm not very fluent with that at the moment. I'll have a look at the docs.