A New Comic Management System?

[undeadorion]

Fill out the poll on google forms!!

Soon I will be required to do an ambitious project for a class that I'm in, and I figured why not make it something that actually has some utility in the real world! Heck, getting frustrated with the systems out there and not being able to do much is what led me to even learning web development in the first place, so it's time to act on that.

The options out there right now for self hosted comics are uh...limited, to say the least. And mostly severely out of date. There's wordpress, but it's bloated and cumbersome and most plugins used for webcomics aren't maintained. There's Grawlix, which is pretty lightweight but was abandoned by its creator and took serious efforts of people more skilled than I to even get it functional again. There is also Comic Control, which seems to have had some behind-the-scenes issues and isn't exactly the most intuitive.

My plan is to make something that will be very accessible to those who aren't web savvy and allow tons of freedom to those who are. It will be built on a framework called Django, which uses python as its code base. But that's just the under-the-hood type code that most people don't even need to touch. The front end stuff would require no PHP knowledge like the other systems. You just need to know html and CSS. If you want to get advanced, all you'd add is a small handful of keywords for Django's templating language.

The form listed above doesn't allow for much discussion or views of plans, so please use this thread to go more in depth about what sort of functionality you'd like to see in your management systems for your comics.

[undeadorion]

Things I personally want to include:
- Easy template changes for people who just want the base template but want to alter colors, header images, arrows, etc.
- Advanced template system for those who want to alter the code.
- A blog that is only optionally connected to individual comic pages and can be browsed separately.
- The option to exclude updates from a reading archive, either entirely or after a certain date (ie announcing an event, merch, etc)
- Ability to assign pages to a "chapter" but not alter reading order (ie assigning all "extras" to a single "chapter", but they still appear in chronological order with the rest of the pages)
- Batch upload of pages
- More than 1 image per update
- Auto assign dates based on selected update schedule.
- Choose default time for comics to go life.
- Social media integration to auto post for you when a page goes live, complete with custom image and text, not just a link.
------------------------------------------
Requested features/things to research:

- Ability to transfer smoothly from Grawlix to this system
- Maintain links with disqus comments on individual pages