So, one of the things that we want to do with Atonement is to create a sort of open-source backend tool for creating sleek websites for webcomics that are easy to manage, and cleaner than some tools out there (like ComicPress). So, the Atonement website's backend tool is a work in progress by Faye Yao and myself, and we're looking for thoughts on the project, and suggestions for simple-to-use (but effective!) features.
First off, here's the comic's website, since we publish there in addition to Tapastic.
And here's a few screenshots of its backend.
Right now, you can do a few things to help publish your comic on our backend.
You can easily add and manage the privileges of backend users, either individually, or by assigning them to "Groups". For instance, you can give Users the ability to log in and post to your Blog without allowing them the ability to delete or add new comic book pages -- or any other set of privs that you might need to manage.
You can create Blogposts for an optional blog tab of your site (we don't have a blog for Atonement, currently, but I know that many webcomics do!)
You can create multiple "Comic Books" if your site hosts multiple webcomics, which organizes the infastructure of Chapters and Pages at the top-down level. This would let you set up separate tabs for your different comics in a way that wouldn't complicate the ease in which you post new pages.
You can quickly and easily set up Chapters. Chapters help manage long-term projects and groups on the "Archives" page of the website, making it easy to organize an ongoing series automatically. Chapters also organize numerically so that the infrastructure of comic page order is automated and easy to change if you need to for any reason.
You can number the pages in each chapter, further organizing the Archives and comic page order. On the Page tab, the one you'd use most often, things look like this:
So, the Pages section of the backend lets you create and order pages specific to a Chapter. As you can see, you create a Page Name which will appear on the site when that page is loaded. You load your image, which is automatically resized to fit in the site's Single-Page-App style frame. Then, you have Author Notes, which do allow for you to use HTML code for any sort of advanced formatting.
And, of course, there's an API Key section in case you want to fit any outside APIs into the framework of the website.
One thing that we haven't finished, yet, is the ability to use the backend to change graphic assets (banner, background, menu font, etc). That's sort of the final step once the nitty/gritty and features are as we want them to be.
Other things that the site does:
It's a single page application, which means a more modern and (some would say) more pleasing site to navigate on than sites that are more Web 2.0 in style. A lot of Tapastic is designed in the SPA style, too, because it's generally more mobile friendly.
It disallows right-click/saves on images, protecting your art from downloaders. It also encodes the image links when you upload to a page, making it impossible to "guess" the image path for downloaders.
It embeds Facebook comments next to each page's Author Notes.
It has a built-in section for Community (like a forum, or a link to a Facebook page, or your Tapastic, however you'd prefer to set it up).
It has a built-in section for an About page, which allows you to describe your comic and its creator/s.
It's still pretty early on in the development cycle for us, but it's time to get some feedback on it. Our goal is to offer it up, entirely free and open-source, for anyone looking for a simple and powerful backend for creating a webcomic site! So, in that case, my questions are:
- Does this seem useful to you at all?
- What don't you like about it?
- What do you like about it?
- What would make this more useful to you, without moving too far away from our core concept of "keep it simple, keep it easy to use"?
Thanks! 
