An Experimental Life

This tutorial, at least for now, will just focus on getting a basic webcomic setup going. Later on, though, you may want to trick out your site. The easiest an most efficient way to add features while keeping everything integrated is to use a CMS.

Drupal is the premiere open source CMS (content management system) available. It is free, and has been around for ten years now, with the same person overseeing overall development. Among numerous other awards, Drupal has won the Packt Publishing Open Source CMS Awardsfor two years running, and CNet's Web Top 100 awards for three years running.

Beyond the basics, there are thousands of actively supported add-on modules to let users build anything from the most basic blog or forum site all the way on up to sophisticated ecommerce and wiki sites. It is the most versatile open-source CMS available. In fact, a partial list of those using Drupal for their sites includes Sony Music, MTV UK, Warner Brothers Records, the New York Observer, Popular Science... and the list goes on. Even The Webmaster Forums have switched to Drupal from vBulletin.

Here are just a few of the things you can do with Drupal and a few contrib mods (you by no means have to do all or any of them, of course--and this is barely scratching the surface of the possibilities.):

• Upload a bunch of comics ahead of time and set them to automatically publish themselves (or unpublish) on the dates and times you choose.
• Have character bios automatically link to and from every comic they appear in.
• Install a WYSIWYG editor for text spaces.
• Automatically create as many or as few different image sizes as you want when you upload, and have the site automatically know where to display each of them.
• Customize views (and have multiple views) of any kind of content. Automatically.
• Use a single login for users to comment on your comic, post to your forums, etc., instead of running a separate piece of software for everything.
• Make your site multi-lingual.
• If you want your users to be able to submit fan art, you can set it up so they can upload it at the touch of a button, instead of having them upload it to someplace and linking to it.
• Set up as coarse or as fine-grained permissions as you like. For example, maybe you only want to let trusted users upload fan art--No problem. Or you want to let someone administer one thing on the site without giving them access to anything else. Also no problem. Set up a user role with the permissions you want, and click check boxes on a list of users to assign them to that role. You can even set things up so that users are automatically promoted when they fulfill certain requirements.
• Just about anything you can do with phpBB, WordPress, Topsites software, MediaWiki, or ecommerce software, but all in one.
• Let users vote content up or down. For instance, if you want to have a reader-judged fan art contest, there are a number of contrib mods that will allow you to re-order the entries as the votes come in.
• Look for contrib mods in an organized fashion at Drupal.org, view issue ques and usage statistics, etc., to help you decide which module( you want to use. There are multiple modules for most situations. For example, there are several well-maintained image handling modules, and reading the descriptions gives you a pretty good idea of which will work best for you.
• Let users be notified by RSS, email, Instant Messenger, or whatever they want, when content they subscribe to updates.
• Basically, if you can imagine your website doing it, you can probably make it happen with Drupal.