Using Drupal to publish webcomics, part 1

Drupal really missed the boat in not more actively supporting webcomics a few years ago and now WordPress with the help of the very effective Comicpress theme has taken a huge chunk of that market share.  If you’re starting from scratch WordPress + Comicpress is a great way to get going.

But for me I decided this year I was going to put everything I did on Drupal to save me some time administering the various sites I keep up.  Drupal is actualy really good for setting up one code base and running multiple sites off of it.  This way I spend less time updating bits of code (which with Drupal 6 has been a chore over the last year).  This made making Drupal cooperate with webcomics a new priority.

Luckily ubersoft.net has done this already.  Christopher Wright actually put together a great webcomic install of Drupal a couple of years ago so much of what I want to do will simply be following in his footsteps.  To make Drupal webcomics friendly you need to add several modules to the initial install: views, CCK, custom pagers, and imagefield mainly (although FCKeditor and IMCE for ease of uploading images is pretty useful).  You also need to get comfortable with how to use CCK (stands for content creation kit) and Views which, while much easier to use than a few years ago, is still not something many webcomic creators will want to grapple with.

In any event, I’ve got a first version up — I’ll probably continue to tinker with it some and I’ll blog about it if there’s something worth writing about.

Uncategorized

Xaviar Xerexes

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