Hello, all, this is Rob Barba of Megami Studios. I'm writing this article series for the wonderful folks here at Fan to Pro detaililng the launch of our primary series Claude & Monet. After all, what better way to show moving from fans to professional geeks than to do it right before the cameras? During the next 30 days (okay, well, 29, since we started late), either myself or Ayne Hart (the studio artist) will be presenting what we're doing while prepping for launch, from the high points to the low, from the scars to the bottles of aspirin, and everything in between. You'll also get to see some of the behind the scenes look at what it takes to launch a work; even at the end of the 30-day-period, when there's just one starting page on the screen, it takes a lot more than people tend to realize, and we're putting that out there for you.
Now, one bit of warning: we're showing you all the ugly sides. Which means that oftentimes, we're going to have opinions that may be different than the standard (because when you really want to make a good impression, start insulting people…right…..) and that many might vastly disagree with. Well, that's what the comments section below is for. Voice your opinions! Let them fly!
And with that….
Day 30: WordPress & Comicpress, How I Hate Thee.
Okay, it's Sunday. Thirty days to go. I've got the placeholder site up, and I'm currently working on the site to be cloaked (for those you not familiar, cloaking a site is having a site that's actually underneath the URL – for example, what you see at example.com might actually be maintained at subdomain.example.com). But regardless of what your site is or whether it's cloaked or not, you need a site for your webcomic. Otherwise, it's just a gallery. Unless it's DeviantArt.
But in any case, if you're someone putting out a webcomic, that means you're using software to get it out there and chances are, that software is the one-two punch of WordPress and Comicpress. It's free, it's used by well-known professionals, and it's updated regularly by a team of competent programmers.
It's also, in my opinion, buggy and a nightmare if you have no idea on how to use WordPress (or worse, no nothing about websites at all). The official position of the CP staff seems to be "eh, you'll figure it out," and it's a layer running on WordPress, a blogging tool which has been well-overused. Don't get me wrong, WordPress is a great blogging tool – that's what it was created for. But a CMS (content management system), it is not. It wasn't meant to handle the dozens of pages that are needed for the creation of a successful webcomic site, and though it does it, it doesn't do it well, in my opinion.
A webcomic, in my opinion, should be run on something that is meant to handle the stress of it. There are dozens of ones out there designed to handle the job. ComicCMS, is one, for example; it's a CMS spedfically designed for webcomics. Another good one, is Drupal. While it wasn't created for webcomic sites, I've seen it successfully used for sites, and plugins are available. And, of course, there's my favorite CMS, Joomla. While it is difficult to set up, it's also fairly bulletproof afterwards. It's what we use to build nearly all the various sites for Megami Studios.
Note I said nearly. People have been clamoring since 2006 for a webcomic extension for Joomla. So naturally, after five years…people are still waiting. While I have a coding guru friend of mine working on a solution (it's amazing what the words "people will pay for it!" will do for motivation), it's not going to come in time for launch. So, WordPress and the hell that is Comicpress looks like the job.
I started working on it Saturday morning. I consider myself fairly competent at code (you have to be, to work with the "bare metal" in Joomla). As of that evening, I wanted to brain the code with my keyboard.
Fortunately, Ayne found a solution: a lesser used extension called, simply, Webcomic. I can honestly say that while CP's modus operandi seems to be "You'll want to get everything perfect for your webcomic!", Webcomic is, "You've got better things to do than to work with the backend." It's tailormade for artists by an artist, and moreso, one that didn't forget that little detail. It's Sunday evening and I have most of the code for the site done. Granted, there are some minor issues here and there (nothing's perfect), it lets me do more writing on storyboards and scripts than writing script.
Webcomic: it's good for us, it'll be good for all you future comickers, and your blood pressure will thank you.