this macro displays the create time of a story. while this might sound not too interesting in general, there is an exciting twist that can enhance your weblog to obtain scheduling capabilities.

if you add the parameter as="editor" to this macro and put the whole thing into the "form for creating/editing a story" skin, a new input field will appear whenever you create or edit a story:

<% story.createtime as="editor" %>

by default, the new field contains the current date (ie. the date and time when you activated the link to the form). but you can modify the contents to give your story a date lying in the very past or future.

For all the other options you can use within this macro see date and time (and how to format them)

If you add the option as="link" the formatted create time of the story will appear as link to the appropriate day-listing, but only if you published the story in the weblog. If your story was published just in a topic it won't appear as link, just as plain text (the same will happen if the story is offline, of course).

<% story.createtime as="link" %>

if you want to display a list of referrers linking to a story you can use the macro <% story.backlinks %> inside a story skin.

as an example, take a look at this story over at project.antville.

This macro - as you might assume because of it's name - displays a counter of all comments of a story. So, using it like this:

<% story.commentcounter %>

will result in "0 comments", "1 comment" or "341 comments", depending on the number of comments of a story. You can change the text following the number by using the following attributes:

- text to display if there's no comment
- text to display if there's just one comment
- text to display if there're more than one comments

so (as a quite silly example) your commentcounter-macro might look like this:

<% story.commentcounter no=", absolultely nothing" one=", solamente uno" more=", quite a bunch, isn't it?" %>

The whole text will be linked to the main view of the story, and there's another attribute that you can (and probably will) use, it's called "anchor". By adding anchor="comments" a user will jump directly to the first comment.

probably some of you already noticed the little orange "xml" button at the bottom of the antville sidebar. this is what it looks like:

if you cannot spot it, you probably modified your site's page layout before we introduced the button. in this case you can add the macro yourself:

<% site.xmlbutton %>

simply put it at the desired place in a skin and voilà!

the button links to a document that contains all the stories that are visible on the main page of a site but without any layout information (except for what was put into the stories).

this document is in a special xml format called rss (which means rdf site summary, and in turn, rdf means resource description framework).

actually, you do not need to know much more about these pretty technical terms. however, if you are interested in some background information, there is a good collection of articles and links at the o'reilly rss devcenter.

generally, for sites rss documents provide a standard way to distribute their core data (in antville these are site stories stripped from any layout) among various publishing channels.

because of the rather strict format, the rss documents then can be read and processed by other people and other tools. such tools include e.g. radio userland (win/mac), knewsticker (linux) or this javascript rss viewer.

using rss feeds bloggers easily can exchange and syndicate their site's content with each other or news services like my netscape or news is free.

if you want to display a list of recently updated sites currently maintained in an antville installation (just like the one on the antville main page), you can use this macro:

<% sitelist limit="number_of_sites" %>

e.g. <% sitelist limit="50" %> will show the 50 most recently updated sites.

if you leave away the limit parameter, the list will contain 10 sites only (however, you can go beyond this number). and there is a general limit that you cannot exceed (currently 100 sites).

please note that this macro only works in skins, not in stories or comments.