God I hate the behavior of the escape key and textarea boxes, at least in IE. Please, the name of the turkey who determined that hitting escape should clear a textarea box without anyway of redo.
'Nuff said, I'll retype this answer back in.
Well that points out the us software developers aren't the best UI developers. I had thought that owners of a blog would find the intriguing redballs and colored pawprints intriguing and mouse over them or click on them. Mousing over would reveal the alt text, 'manage your blog', and 'post new entry', and clicking would bring them to the right form. (And I thought the pawprint somewhat iconically representative, "click here to leave your footprint on the blog")
Anyway, as I mentioned it's a relatively simple process to template/theme, so I just created a "new user" theme that is more textual in nature. If you return, and change your blog to the new user theme, that should clarify pieces of the interface.
http://www.theashergroup.com/bboard/blog?topic_id=17&theme_id=24
You're right about the canonical blog being a one person as owner kind of thing and bboard permissions involving groups of folks as owners and typically allowing most people to post new topics. It's also true, IIRC, that the typical ACS bboard either gives complete freedom to the users to create any kind of bboard they wish, or no freedom at all. So I changed bboard a bit. The default for 'blog' bboards is that any user can create one blog bboard, regardless of
other settings of the bboard system.
I've also made changes to ensure that only the owner of the blog (or members of a particular blogs admin group) can post new blog entries or admin the blog, everyone else can just reply to existing threads. That's similar to what one of the weird stuff parameters claims to do, but under the hood the weird stuff parameter doesn't prevent folks from posting new entries, it just removes the links that make it obvious. Anyone can actually create a post to q-and-a-post-reply-form.tcl that will enter a post into weird stuff'd bboard that claims to let only the owner originate a post. That's not supposed to be the case with blog forums. Only blog owners can post entire new blog entries.
Finally, I just want to thank you for taking the time to test the system, and post your comments.
