This macro renders by default a link to the form for adding a new comment.

<% story.commentlink %>

Now this might appear a bit useless since you could also use the link-macro to do the same:

<% story.link to="comment" %>

The main reason for this special macro is that it checks if comments are enabled for a story or not: if comments are disabled it won't display anything. There are two attributes for customizing the result:

<% story.commentlink to="comment" text="place your comment!" %>

to means the page this macro should link to, and text defines what should appear as link. The above example shows the defaults (so you can omit them if that's what you want).

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.