For most items of a weblog (images, files, stories, comments) and also the weblog itself Antville keeps track of the date and time it was created and when it was last modified. There are two basic macros, createtime and modifytime, that you can use for display.

The weblog itself in addition has a special macro called lastupdate that will contain the date and time whenever an item inside a weblog (or the weblog itself) was updated or a new one was created.

Now, here are a few examples:

<% story.createtime format="short" %>

This will give you the date and time when your weblog was created, using the default "short" formatting as you defined it in the preferences of your weblog. To use the long format simply use the option format="long"

To display the date and time when eg. an image was modifed place the following somewhere in a skin:

<% image.modifytime format="long" %>

And to display the date and time your weblog was last updated place this eg. in the main skin:

<% site.lastupdate format="EE, dd.MM.yyyy, HH:mm" %>

In this example we're using a custom formatting pattern, where each part of it will return the following:

• EE the abbreviated day name (eg. "Mon")
• dd the day of the month with a leading zero if necessary (to avoid that use a single 'd')
• MM the month of the year, also using a leading zero. M will avoid the leading zero, MMM will give you the abbreviated month name, MMMM the full name of it.
• yyyy the year displayed as four digits. yy will use just the last two digits.
• HH means the hour of the day
• mm means the minute of the hour

There are a lot more patterns you can use for formatting date and time, you can find a complete list in sun's java api documentation

The output of these macros will change according to the language you defined in the preferences of your weblog, with one exception: if you use site.lastupdate and there were no updates in your weblog so far, it will display the text no updates so far, all other macros won't display anything.

This macro will be replaced by the rendered skin "searchbox" which contains the input field for entering the search-terms plus the button for submitting the search-request. If you don't modify the searchbox-skin it will look like this:

This macro works hand in hand with three skins to build the navigation depending on the user's status:

<% site.navigation for="users" %>
DEPRECATED. Since version 1.1pre2 the navigation bar for users is not supported by the site.navigation macro anymore. Navigation items for all users should be directly included in the site's main.skin. This macro call won't be supported in the final release so it's a good idea to update the user navigation now.

<% site.navigation for="contributors" %>
will be replaced with the navigation-bar for contributors (which in most cases will contain links for creating a new story etc.). if the user doesn't belong to the contributors of a weblog nothing will be displayed. If you enabled "Allow contributions" in your weblog-preferences this navigation-skin will be displayed for all logged in users.

<% site.navigation for="admins" %>
same as above, but antville will check if the user belongs to the administrators of a weblog and either render the navigation bar for admins or nothing.

To change the skins simply go to the skin editor of your weblog and scroll down to the section "navigation skins". In antville's default skinset you can find this macro in the skin "main page".