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donathinfrye
Jan '16

So, one of the things that we want to do with Atonement6 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 website12, since we publish there in addition to Tapastic.

And here's a few screenshots of its backend.

webback1.jpg744x587 189 KB

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:

webback3.jpg1428x579 315 KB

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! smile

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    Jan '16

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nickysoh
Jan '16

Hi @donathinfrye,

I think this is amazing. I know this is work in progress still but lots of the stuff already looks promising.(It almost looks like the magenta kind of platform.) I'm using wordpress so this migration would be much more difficult for me personally. I like wordpress simply because there's a lot of customization when it comes to plugins. Having said that, I think what you guys have is amazing. It would be great if

(1) the comic pages would automatically move to the next page upon clicking of images.
(2) initially the forum page looks like a blog page. But after clicking in it seems like a real forum! I wish I could add that to wordpress. That's a great thing to have for a webcomic.

I think this is an amazing website. But since I'm already in wordpress and have a theme and lots of plugin option, this might not be viable for me but definitely something I think a lot of webcomic artist would love to use! (I wish this was up earlier so i didn't have to learn to use wordpres and hard code the plugin into my site)

donathinfrye
Jan '16

Those suggestions are exactly the sorts of things that we're looking for!

I definitely understand how daunting it might be to consider leaving other platforms behind to relaunch on a new platform, especially if you've been publishing for a long time! Our hope's to provide a good design application for new comic sites that's a little more modern and less frustrating to manipulate than Wordpress and similar sites can be.

We're also going to keep the platform open-source, which should let folks branch and contribute various options, tweaks, and plug-ins. That's definitely important, because different comics definitely have different needs.

Thanks for the feedback! : )