Comixpedia Now Powered By Drupal

NOTE:  You can use your existing id and password.  On your first log-in (and your first logout) to this site you will see an error message but only that first time.  Just log-in and go to "my account" and from there you should have no problems at this site.

The RSS Feed for the site is at http://altertainment.org/node/feed (or http://comixpedia.com/node/feed) (there’s a link to it on the top menu).

BIGGEST CHANGE TO KNOW ABOUT: There is no longer a "submit news" function – instead go to "My Blog" (in that menu upper left corner of the site) and post a new blog entry for yourself.  The Comixpedia editors will promote those of general interest to the front page.  My sense is this better then the old system b/c now even if we don’t post it to the front page (or don’t post it right away) it’s still on the site on your "blog" and it’ll show up on the RECENT BLOG POSTS block (which is in the lefthand column).

Also if stuff isn’t working or you experience weird stuff I haven’t mentioned email me at xerexes AT gmail DOT com so I can investigate.  Thanks!

KNOWN BUGS:

  • If your user account # at the old site was 2215 or higher you will need to create a new account here.
  • If you click on a story or forum link that says –  Access denied: You are not authorized to access this page – it’s probably because it was a post from a very recent user that I did not get ported over to  the new database.  It should be resolved soon.

Quick update on Comixpedia: we have a new server online which means no more bandwidth/cpu/harddrive problems so that’s good!

Also good, but will be a bit disruptive this week is that in moving to the new server I’m migrating part of "Comixpedia" to a new platform running on Drupal.  In fact, if you’re reading this you’ve made it to the new Drupalized Comixpedia.  Drupal is going to let the Comixpedia community do a lot more community things and once we get used to it I am positive it’s going to make things a lot more interesting here.  But in moving servers and altering DNS entries it may be a day (or even 2) before everyone’s seeing the right sites at the right URLs.

Here’s how Comixpedia will work going forward:

  • Comixpedia.com will host the news, forums (and not yet but soon the calendar and magazine) and be the primary community site to check out everyday.
  • Comixpedia.net will host the library of creators and webcomics and the top list.  I have more ideas for this site but I’m not sure on when I’ll get to them.
  • Comixpedia.org (which is currently down) will continue to host the Encyclopedia Webcomics, the community-edited webcomics wiki.

So what’s new at Comixpedia.com?

An amazingly powerful taxonomy system.  Now when you want to write about something here at Comixpedia you’ll see that you can tag it with a genre, collective, publisher, local group or general news topic.  Or tag it with more than one type of category.  And the same categories apply to all types of content: stories, blogs and forum posts (and later magazine articles as well).

Every user gets a "blog" at Comixpedia.com.  Which isn’t really about all of you "blogging" here – what it means is that every creator can post about every new project she or he is working on as often as they want.  All of those posts will show up on the Recent Blog Posts list and the Comixpedia editors will promote those of notable interest to the front page.  There’ll be lots more writing about webcomics with lots less filtering from Comixpedia.  (This by the way is a "blog post" in my blog)

No more PHPBB hacks.  Seriously that’s huge.  What the Drupal forums lack in PHPBB familiarity they make up for in intelligent design.  Just like the new user blogs, the Comixpedia editors can promote those forum posts of notable interest to the front page.

Track stories and other people on the site better – the track function has much more potential to let you keep up on stories, forum posts and comments than the old platform.

And there’s much more I can bring to this site as I work through Drupal on my testbed site. 

To get here I had to handcraft some scripts to transfer the mySQL data over here.   Everything made it (although the last 2-3 days of user accounts, forum posts and stories and comments I may have missed some chunk of that) although there will be a few quirks at first. 

  • There’s no tracking information generated by what I just transferred over.  So until we start generating content natively here you won’t be able to make use of the tracking functions I mentioned above.
  • The forum posts will often repeat the initial post as the first reply.  (If you see that with one of your forum posts, please go ahead and delete the duplicate reply)
  • I was able to bring back the original forum posts and combine it into the new forum structure.  So the entire forum history of Comixpedia is back in one place.
  • I moved over the old 24 Hour Pixel People staff blog posts. 

There’s a lot I’m sure I’ll hear from folks over this month.  The design for example is not mine, it’s an off-the-shelf model.  I’ll be working on that at some point in the future again. 

Actually I’m positive tomorrow will be a rocky day so since it’s well-after midnight, I’m headed to bed. 

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Xaviar Xerexes

Wandering webcomic ronin. Created Comixpedia (2002-2005) and ComixTalk (2006-2012; 2016-?). Made a lot of unfinished comics and novels.

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