Please explain the Antville 1.2 changes

Whoa, that's a pretty load of questions (and I still wonder if I should be glad you did not read my rights to me... ;)

However, I'll try to answer them accordingly:

General

1. Secured passwords: Before, passwords were sent as cleartext, now they are scrambled and salted with a simple MD5 encryption. Thus, passwords are neither sent nor stored cleartext anymore, not even a database administrator can read your password.

2. Replacable images: it's now possible to simply upload a different (image) file into an already existing image or file object in Antville; in the image / file editor you still have the corresponding form button.

3. Archive: There are no different archives, it's still the one you should be used to. Only the URLs have changed, furthermore you can display those parts of the Archive for one month, day or year as well.

4. Simplified permission management: This relates rather to the modifications in the back-end; for a summary of how this affects the front-end I currently can only point you to this summary in german.

5. Search works for you? Well, ain't that fantastic?!

6. Yes, new sites have been disabled for years; did I state something else somewhere? If so, please let me know where; it should be corrected.

7. Editing of the login skin is disabled because besides being a core part of the Antville software it was open for spoofing and fishing if someone simply would have modified the form action in the skin to point to another URL – which in turn renders any effort to secure your password meaningless.

8. AFAIK, Antclick was never maintained by the Antville Project; it was a great contribution by Chris Langreiter if I remember it right...

Topics/Tags

1. Mutliple tags should be entered comma-separated in the corresponding form field.

2. Currently, there still is the option to select existing tags using the good old "topic" drop down menu (macro: [Macro not allowed in sandbox: story.topicchooser] ).

Revised Terminology

If you shouldn't be able to deduce answers to these questions from the summary in german I encourage you to simple try out the various settings. Generally, "open" always means access for any registered user, "public" relates to subscribed users, "restricted" only includes contributors, managers and owners and "closed" reduces access to owners only.

1. Notifications: Here you can choose the user group that should get an e-mail whenever a story/comment is posted or modified.

2. Web hooks are explained in the callbacks section of the API page.

3. The restore button reloads the text previously entered into a story or comment form (e.g. when you accidentally closed your browser window).

Layouts

1. Layouts themselves have not been disabled at all, only the feature to manage multiple layouts is gone.

2. Layout images are images for your layout and thus are ex-/imported with any layout, too. They have been existing for years already.