Comicaster: The Comic Focused CMS is Ready to Download and It's Open Source
Comicaster is a comic blog style content management system. I Built Comcaster to be able to play with new ways of interacting with my comic. I'll share more in the coming weeks about the hows and whys I built it and how it's been running Art Geek Zoo. For now, let's go over the key features and the details of how you can give it a try.
Key Features
- Google App Engine hosted. This is a giant topic to itself, but it means your site is cloud-hosted, has a useful admin dashboard, is easy to upgrade/rollback versions, has free hosting up to very reasonable limits, reasonable prices beyond that.
- Server code written in Python.
- A site API to find, filter, and browse comics and posts.
- Simple template system to customize the look of your site.
Installing Comicaster: The Checklist
- Get a released version of Comicaster at http://code.google.com/p/comicaster/downloads/list
- You'll need a google account, e.g. a standard Gmail user.
- Create a spot for your Application at http://appengine.google.com/
- Get the Google App Engine SDK for Python for your platform at: http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html
- Install the SDK and run the "Google App Engine Launcher" tool to set up a local folder as your Comicaster development site
- Configure Comicaster. In your text editor, review the settings and make changes as you see fit in the following files:
- app.yaml (settings for google app engine)
- comicaster_config.yaml (settings for comicaster)
- rocket/config.py (settings for backup/restore of your Comicaster site's Datastore)
- apikey.txt (settings to use Akismet - the incredible anti-spam service from Wordpress, you'll need to get an API key from Wordpress.com for this)
- Run your site locally via the Google App Engine Launcher
- Test in a browser, make changes to the files in the templates folder to customize your site
- When you're ready, upload it to http://appengine.google.com/ via the Google App Engine Launcher tool.
- Visit your site's Dashboard on http://appengine.google.com/ to see useful activity, data logs, error logs, versions of your app, and more.
- Visit your app, to login and make posts add "/login" to the URL.
- Post some comics!
Comic Markup
- Gives some structure to your given post that can be used by your site's display templates
- It helps glue simple authoring of posts with flexible yet simple template authoring
- Currently only indicates what image in a post is the comic, more comic markup features coming: e.g. comic "hotspots" to link to behind the scenes info, other comics, etc. as the author sees fit.
- More information coming as more features are added to Comicaster
Posting Via Your Site (uses Comic Markup)
- Login to your site. The default template puts three "admin" links in the footer: "New Post", "Admin", and "Sign Out"
- Go to the "New Post" page
- Set the post's settings and body, upload image(s)
- Note that if you make a comic post, the comic image should be designated by the [comic] [/comic] comic markup tag
Posting Via Email (doesn't use Comic Markup)
- You can email comics, regular blog posts, and page style posts to your site by emailing the address you setup in "app.yaml"
- You can disable posting via email by deleting or commenting out those lines in your config file "app.yaml"
- Emails with no settings section will be saved as a standard blog entry, draft (it won't post to the site until you login and edit the post to "published" or "scheduled")
- Email settings are simple "name: value" lines in the top of your email message preceeding a triple dash "---".
- attached image(s) need to have a placeholder within the message body e.g. if an attached file is called "comic-episode-110.png" you'll need to put a placeholder within the body "comic-episode-110.png" to have Comicaster place a proper image tag pointing to the uploaded image or comic.
- current supported attachments are images (jpg, png) and Flash (swf)
Example Email
To: your app engine's allowed post email address
Subject: This will be the post tile
book: The Fun Funny Times of Fun Folks
chapter: The Penultimate Plot Arc
Stay tuned for the next exciting episode and thanks for reading my comic!