Project Antville

Tuesday, 27. May 2003

User FAQ

What are skins?

To be very brief: skins are templates. Basically the layout of an Antville site consists of several skins, each of them defining a part of HTML code enriched with macros (for an explanation of macros proceed to the next answer). Some skins are used within every page, some are only used in specific circumstances, eg. there is a preview skin for stories and one displaying the full story including the comments. You don't need any scripting knowledge to modify the skins to your needs, but you should know at least a bit about HTML.

What are macros?

Macros are what makes Antville such a powerful publishing system. Instead of assuming that users should know about Javascript Antville offers a rich set of macros which are basically special tags that you can embed in skins, stories, comments etc. These macros tell Antville to do some more specific things like eg. to render an image as a link to a popup window, to embed a poll in a story or to just place the title of a site in a page title. Most macros are very easy to use while offering a set of options you can use to change the behaviour of the macro, eg. you can embed the last 10 images of different weblog in your own as links back to the originating site. For a complete documentation of macros have a look at http://macros.antville.org and at the default skins.

Why are there some macros without a dot in the name and some with?

Without going too deep into the structure of the software Antville: if you see a macro like story.image the part left of the dot defines the realm of the macro (in this case story), while the part on the right side of the dot is the name of the macro (image). Now this shouldn't confuse you, for a lot of macros it doesn't matter if you specify the left part or not, so eg. story.image will lead to the same result as image. However some macros need the realm specified. For a specific explanation of each macro please proceed to http://macros.antville.org.

Do I need to quote the options of a macro?

Yes and no: you can omit the quotes for macro options if you just have one option and no spaces in the option value, eg:
<% link to="http://www.antville.org" text="have a look at Antville" %>
will display have a look at Antville, while
<% link to="http://www.antville.org" text=have a look at Antville %>
will display have, the rest of the text is cut off because of the missing quotes. In general it's a good idea to quote all options.

Where can i find a documentation of Antville macros?

The complete documentation of macros is available at http://macros.antville.org.

Somehow i managed to completely destroy the layout of my site. How can I revert that?

First try if you still can access the skin editor. Depending on where and how your site is hosted one of the following ways might lead you to it:

For local AntClick installations:
http://localhost:8080/myblog/skins
If your site is hosted at blogs.antville.org:
http://myblog.antville.org/skins
or see if you can remember the URL of your blog and simply append /skins to it.

If you can access the skin editor locate the skin that you edited last and click on "reset". This will revert all changes and restore the default skin (if you know what you did wrong reverting your last change by hand is also a possibility).

If you cannot even access the skin editor it's still possible to revert the change, but it might be harder to do it: most likely the bug is in the main page skin, so try entering the following URL in your browser:

For local AntClick installations:
http://localhost:8080/myblog/skins/site/page/delete?remove=delete
If your site is hosted at blogs.antville.org:
http://myblog.antville.org/skins/page/delete?remove=delete
or see if you can remember the URL of your blog and simply append /skins/page/delete?remove=delete to it.

This should delete your crappy skin and restore the default skin. If this also doesn't help post a message in http://help.antville.org, there are plenty of people out there that will help you.

I tried to use the macro xyz in a story, but all i'm getting is [Macro xyz not allowed in sandbox]. What's wrong?

Antville has a built in security mechanism that only allows specific macros for stories or comments. The message simply says that you've tried to embed a forbidden macro in your story.

Which macros can i use in stories/comments?

Currently you can use the following macros in stories or comments:

I have a problem with my weblog on blogs.antville.org, where can i get help?

Please post your question in http://help.antville.org.

Is it possible to change the order of stories in a list?

No, currently this is not possible, the only order of stories is reverse chronological.

Why is there first a chance to edit a poll and then (after two or three times editing this poll) editing isn't possible anymore?

This doesn't have anything to do with the number of editing actions. Antville prohibits editing a poll after the first user has voted, so that's why.

Can i use w.bloggar or any other tool requiring Blogger API to post to my blog?

Yes, Antville supports the Blogger API. Again it depends on whether you are using your own Antclick installation or a blog hosted at blogs.antville.org:

For AntClick use the following settings:

acount alias: xxx.antville.org 
host: localhost
page: /xyz
port: 8081
timeout: 30

For a blog hosted at blogs.antville.org use the following settings:

acount alias: xyz.antville.org 
host: xyz.antville.org 
page: / 
port: 5056 
timeout: 30

Of course the settings for AntClick only work with the default parameters (meaning that you didn't change eg. the port in hop.sh/hop.bat).

I still have to log in repeatedly although i'm using Antville's "remember me" feature. Why?

Antville's "remember me" feature uses cookies to store your username and password (the latter is encrypted) for logging you in automatically. However, for security reasons we had to bind these cookies to the IP address of your machine, meaning that when the IP address changes the cookie isn't valid anymore. Depending on your Internet connection this can happen often, eg. if you have a dial up account you probably will get a different IP address every time you connect to the net. Also using a proxy might have this effect ("anonymizing proxies"). There is no way to change that (besides changing your Internet connection to one with a static IP address). If this annoys you please don't forget that this behaviour is mainly to protect your account from being exploited.

Can i change the URL/alias of my weblog afterwords?

No, currently there's no way to change the alias of a site after it was created.

What is the difference between private and public weblogs?

First of all "private" means that only specific users can access a weblog. "Specific users" include Subscribers, Contributors, Content Managers and Admins. However, in difference to a public weblog users cannot subscribe themselves to a private weblog, they have to be granted the subscriber status by an Administrator of the weblog.

What is the difference between Subscribers, Contributors, Content Managers and Administrators?

Those are permission roles used in Antville, so depending on which role a user has within a site things are allowed or forbidden. The very basic role is that of an Anonymous user which is one that hasn't even registered within an Antville installation. Anonymous users are only allowed to read, but not to post comments or the like. The next step is being a registered user. Those are additionally allowed to post comments and vote in polls. Additionally if a weblog has "Allow contributions" switched on in its preferences subscribed users are also allowed to create stories, polls, upload images or files. The other roles defined themselves as following:

Subscribers are basically the same as registered users, they just have their subscribed weblogs listed in their subscriptions. In private weblogs this is the least role that has access (all others can't even read stories)
Contributors are allowed to create/publish stories, polls, upload images or files. They can only edit stories/comments created by themselves (same with subscribers)
Content Managers additionally have the right to edit stories, comments, images, files and polls created by other users, so basically they have full access to all the content of a site.
Administrators finally can do anything within a site. The creator of a weblog will automatically be granted administration rights and this user can grant the same level or a lower one to any other subscribed user.

Finally there is a last role called System Administrators who are not restricted at all, meaning that they can access even private weblogs, change the preferences of an Antville installation and the like.

What are trusted users/trusted websites?

"Trust" in the case of users means that they have some special rights (depending on the system preferences of an Antville installation). The main benefit of this is that one can limit the creation of new weblogs to trusted users in system preferences (if a trusted user creates a new weblog it will be granted trust too). Trusted weblogs on the other hand can stay private for any time (provided that the automatic cleanup feature of Antville is used).

... link

Sunday, 25. May 2003

How to configure Apache as frontend web server

robert, 20:33h

The following documents at http://helma.org will help you in configuring Apache as the frontend web server of an Antville installation:

... link

... older stories

Online for 2819 days
Last update: 2007-09-25 11:46

... Antville.org

recent updates

Release Plan
The roadmap below is obsolete. A newly compiled roadmap...

by robert (2007-09-25 11:46)