Comicaster is a simple comic blog style content management system.

Comicaster started life as a fork of cpedialog and approcket - many thanks to those two projects!

From there it was pruned-back and grown in a direction focused on addressing the needs of an artist/team providing a web comic and to the user experience of the readers.

This is the software that runs my web comic: Art Geek Zoo.

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 "---".

date: Tomorrow (use descriptive terms or a specific date-time mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm status: (published, draft, or scheduled) tags: (any comma separated list of single words) type: (blog, page, comic) book: (name of book it should be listed - optional) chapter: (name of chapter it should be listed - optional)

• 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
From: any email account
Subject: This will be the post tile
Message:
date: Tomorrow
status: scheduled
tags: humor,comic,book2
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!
__comic-episode-110.png__