Where's the demo?

Ah, nevermind. I installed it myself and you can see the demo here: http://creativeupload.com

Yeah, I was bored and registered this domain last summer or so. Maybe we could turn it into a community driven comic blog for people to upload their comics to. Hmmm...

Oh awesome! Good work, Hari. Please make sure you get some publicity for this!

Thanks Drew, for testing out the script. About a community driven comic blog, I'm all for it. Let me know how I can help!

Sudipta. I know. I've already shared it with a couple of comics communities on the internet.

Well, a community site would be cool. Either allow anyone to upload their comic or modify LiteDoodle to allow user accounts, which would mean make it a database driven backend.

LiteDoodle is too simple to be modified so much.

If indeed we need to work on a community comic blogging system, we have to work on a new solution or use one of the pre-existing CMSes and modify them to suit our needs.

Yeah, agreed. Not sure what existing CMS would do but it would require some heavy modifications.

There's already ComicPress (based on WordPress) but that's for a single blog.

However, that would be a nice starting point.

Not sure if it's easier to use existing CMS or create one from scratch. The one thing though creating from scratch would be to know that it's probably more secure and starting from scratch, you build it how you want it to work.

Using existing code, especially of one that is widely and heavily used is subject to attacks from the evil people.

I guess I better find the time and speed my python learning up a notch, I would love to create one using Python if I do. But then again, I'm always a frontend type of guy when it comes to websites. Also spare and copious amounts of time are always against me as well.

Drew, I can definitely assure you that for a complex CMS script such as the one we require, building one from scratch would take ages. Especially one which supports multiple users and user-levels (along with all the permissions system, session handling, content organization etc.)

I think we must think of several options here and not just using a unified multi-user community CMS script.

Well, if I were to do it with Python, there is Plone that is based off of Python. Very powerful and most Python programmers I know say they'd recommend it.

http://plone.org/

Plone seems a tad overkill (?) but nevertheless is an extremely interesting option. We need to play around with it a bit to get an idea of what it is all about!

Heh, I'm downloading it now and installing to my home server.

I've always been wary of the tag "CMS" - they always confuse me as to how they're structured and why I should use them.

But Plone seems to be different from the common-or-garden PHP-MySQL CMS solution, so I'll keep an open mind about it

Well the one thing I would like is that content by users is moderated in a sense. Reading up on plone now seems to be very structured with permissions on users and has a lot of ways for authentication as well. Might be overkill but then again, strip out what's not needed and only build on what is desired out of it.

But yeah, that's why I said for something like this, might want to build from scratch. Would take a lot of time and dedication but really that's the only way to get what you need out of it without all the extra crud that comes with CMS's or Blogware.

Have you looked at deviantart and other such sites? Is that the kind of thing we're looking at? Or something smaller?

Something smaller. Basic, just a place where users can upload their comics and or artwork. Their creative side. That way it matches the domain name I suppose.

Doesn't b2evolution have the option for users to have their own blog or handle multiple blogs? Something like that would work.

Where there's a main page that might have the most recent posts from users and then they have their own space.

Drew, you've hit it. B2evolution indeed does allow multiple blogs and they can be configured for single/multiple users as well.

Plone does seem like overkill after installing it. Maybe that'll be a side project to help learn Python.

b2evolution installed.

Drew, that's great. Let me know how I can help you with the design and administration of the site (if you want my help at all)

Cool. I've enabled registration, feel free to register and I'll make you an Admin. I tested and found that they have a plugin available to create blogs upon registration for that user, which I'll need to install.

Drew, thanks.

If you do enable registration, then be sure to install the latest anti-spam updates or you'll be deluged by a flood of spam registrations.

We need to do a bit of work, including customizing the look and feel of the website to make it unique and appealing. Also we need a bit of content as well in the home page to draw in some response.

I think you need to rethink enabling blog creation on new user registration, because that can lead to a lot of spam.

Even I had to disable user registration here because of spam user problem

Yeah, good points. I've disabled user registrations now temporarily while we get the site in order.

Cool script.

Thanks Edgeverse.

This was far easier for me to implement than someryC. I appreciate all the work put into this!

Thanks TGecko. Are you using my script on the URL above? If so, a link back to this page would be appreciated. Others can also find the script that way.

Done and done. But could you add tips on how to use the rss script on the included readme file? That's something I'm still struggling with...

In what way do you want help with the RSS file?

RSS is just a subscription. Users click on the RSS link on your blog and subscribe with a newsreader/Firefox Live Bookmarks. If you want to change the number of latest items on the RSS feed, change line in the config.php file:

// Number of RSS entries to publish as feed
define (NUM_FEED, 10);


to whatever value you want (other than 10).

TO include the RSS link in your blog theme (I see you're using a custom design), just add a link to the RSS file anywhere on your blog.

Also add this line inbetween the <head> </head> of the index.php file.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="rss.php" />

Thanks very much for the help, I think I've got it now. I was just thinking that a bit about RSS in the readme file would help RSS-newbies like me

No problem. The only reason I didn't mention anything about RSS feed was that I took it for granted that it works out of the box (so to speak).

In this case, you had changed the theme, so I think you missed out the RSS link in the header.

Generally no changes are necessary to get the RSS feed to work. Only thing you might want to change is that number of recent items.