This macro is also available as <% comment.content %>.

Now this is probably one of the most interesting (and flexible) macros of Antville. Using this macro you can not only display story- or comment-content but also customize the basic structure of stories and comments in your weblog! But let's start with the basics (the following examples show you the usage for both stories and comments):

<% story.content part="title" %>

will display the title of a story - if it has one. Normally nothing would be displayed, but if you use the fallback-attribute you can tell Antville what content-part it should use if no title is available:

<% story.content part="title" fallback="text" %>

This would display the text of the story or comment if it doesn't have a title. If you want to display just the first part of the text you can also do that:

<% story.content part="title" fallback="text" limit="20" %>

will use the text of the story, but display it only 'til the first whitespace after the 20th character (neat, innit? ;-) Additionally the desired part can also link to the main page of the story (this only works with stories as comments do not have a main page!), eg.

<% story.content part="title" fallback="text" limit="20" as="link" %>

will render the title (or the text limited to around 20 characters) as a link to the main page of the story.

Customizing the structure of stories and comments

Let's assume you need stories that not only consist of a title and a text, but you also need a lead-text that should be displayed in all storylists (eg. the frontpage of your weblog, the frontpage of a single day and the main page of a topic).

All you have to do is to modify the skin for editing/creating a new story (you can find it in the "advanced" skins of the skinmanager). Simply add the following to the skin:

<% story.content part="lead" as="editor" cols="30" rows="5" wrap="virtual" %>

Now what will happen? Antville will display a new textarea in the form, and in the moment you save the first story with a lead-text it will be stored. To display it simply edit eg. the story-"preview" skin and use the content-macro again, this time slightly different:

<% story.content part="lead" fallback="text" %>

This will display the lead-text of a story if available, otherwise display the whole text of it. Got the idea? But we're not finished 'til now:

<% story.content part="image" as="editor" %>
and
<% story.content part="image" as="image" linkto="main" %>

will do something else: the first macro - if embedded in the skin for creating/editing a story - will render a simple text-inputfield where you could type in the name of an image out of the imagepool. The second macro will read the name of the image, look in the imagepool if there is an image with this name and - if found - display it as a link to the main page of the story.