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Happens in programming too man. The other night I was working on the error handling system for our UPS/FedEx integration and just couldn't think for the life of me. Total shut down. Something that should have been stupid simple seemed impossible.

It's generally at that point that it's time to just give up and go to bed.

and this is the reason that software needs some easy installation setups.

While to some people it seems somewhat obvious in terms of database connection setup, but for those less tech-oriented, it's not quite so obvious and takes a little explanation.

Hmm, yeah being able to actually search comics would be a nice option. Although, doing a full text search system would more than likely require a database or a hell of a lot of thought in the file system structure. I suppose it could be a plugin available only for SQL-based installs too.

Also keep in mind that things like MySQL's full search system can only search words of more than 3 characters (unless you make changes to the server and recompile). Which at times can make things annoying when searching.

[Content Management System]

Ok so, this is what I'm getting for a feature list:

• Content Management System - System for managing and displaying templates, pages, and supported file types.
  
  • Template management and editing using either basic or advanced methods. Allow setup of automatically used themes for special dates?
  • Page management, used for misc. site pages and comic page layout(s).
  
  


• Template System - Used to allow author to set what template will be used for pages. Useful for things like holiday themes, it should probably use a sectional template system since in many cases people won't want to make or update multiple templates every time they change their site. Needs some more thought on that though.
  
  


• Comic Management System - A sub-system of the page system, the meat of the software's purpose.
  
  • Widget functions to be usable within templates to create things such as calendar or chapter maps to browse comics.
  • Page scheduling to allow multiple submissions which will automatically become enabled for viewing on the specified date/time.
  • Support for per-page posting by guests and users with some measure of intelligent spam bot prevention.
  
  


• Forums System - A basic forum system interface with integrated user login to work across the rest of the site.
  
  
• News System - A basic news and announcements system to allow for posting news and updates which would be accessible through a widget within templates.

Should HTML be allowed within user postings per page? Generally I would strongly advise against something like that, because it's insecure as hell (a user can add a blurb of something like JS to their comment which could compromise security on the users browser for that session). How about max posting lengths?

Also, how would people feel about the ability to have auto-panel layouts? Basically, a means for you to set up a comic page's panels which would display differently depending on how much screen space the user has for the comic. XKCD has done this on some pages.

What other sorts of things did I miss out on here? I know that this is a quick list and is probably missing stuff in it, but short and sweet anyone see anything obvious that I missed?

Well I never said don't use divs.

Use what makes the job easier and faster. It's more of being able to know what's the better solution to use for the particular situation. There's some things that divs are better for, there's some things that tables are better for, just don't forsake one of the other in favor of the other "being more professional".

Here's a hint: Go with the method that works the fastest and is the easiest to implement.

Tables "Just Work^TM" in most cases. Despite what some people may want to claim, it's no more professional to go with a non-table layout than to use them when need be. If anything I'd argue that it's probably less professional because it takes more time in most cases to make a non-table layout actually display properly across all major browsers. Because time is often a very important part of any project, anything that causes it to needlessly take more time is probably more of a detriment to the project than a benefit.

Took us over 2 years to break our contractor of the "all divs and no tables is the way to go" ideal. Simply put, when we began to show that there's things you can do with tables that in many cases you flat out can not do with divs, or that there's many things that are a hell of a lot faster to do with tables, and he realized that it cost him less time and money to just go with what works and get the same end results, he gave up that philosophy.

In a way it's kinda like how so many people think that XML is great! Where as it actually sucks pretty bad in most cases. Things like Ajax are totally pointless when you can generally use Json and achieve equal results in a faster fashion.

Just my $0.02 

If people are still using IE5, screw em. Most the web development community doesn't even support it anymore. IE6 or higher, either upgrade or stop using the internet.

Ahh right, that's how I'd fix it. Even in tables, rather than using padding I'd use divs with margins to properly space things out. Thank you IE for making web development life a pain in the ass. 

There's a dozen methods out there that do things like this. It's playing off the same principal as what I stated earlier. Using something that requires a form of human intelligence in order to pass validation. 

The problem isn't so much as stopping the bots as it is making a method to stop them that doesn't come with the software by default. It has to be configurable by the person running it (preferably initially during installation). Otherwise bot authors will just target it to what the software comes with enabled by default.

It's a Firefox extension called "Web Developer". There's available versions for FF 1.5, FF 2, and FF 3.

The nice thing is, you can load a page and tweak CSS / HTML in real time to see the results being displayed (it will not save them to the site of course, but it'll help diagnose the issue to make the actual fix).

Firebug is a hella awesome extension as well, most wonderful dom inspector for HTML, CSS, and even JS there is I believe. At least IMO.

Another great one is Flashblock, which does just that, blocks all flash applets from loading automatically. This stops all those stupid flash ads in their tracks too. So in combination with Ad Blocker, you can pretty much stop them all.

Hmm, yeah guest posting is the tricky part. You don't want people to be able to post things that are rude or illegal, probably not advertisements either. So it's generally a good idea to generate a hash cache type system to help prevent bots on submission spam.

To be honest, and I'm unsure how people would respond to this, I'd actually almost prefer to make the code a compiled php code module, rather than open source. Don't get me wrong, I love open source, but the issue is when any software becomes well used it tends to be targeted with automatic bot scripts designed specifically to get around any security measures that the software may have built in.

Generally now days, the easiest way to stop bots is to ask a question that's required for registration but requires at least a small bit of human intelligence. Sometimes even a simple math question suffices, but even that can be fooled. So I'm thinking that at the very least I'm going to allow the owners the ability to set a list of optional security questions and answers, one which would be randomly selected upon registration to help prevent bots from just making accounts to spam things.

But people would need to keep in mind, these would need to be question/answers that can be solved easily by a human being. For instance a question like "What do you get when you add the numbers one and two?", where an acceptable answer would be "three" or "3" (minus quotes of course). I'd make answers forced to lower case to keep from a case-sensitive issue too. There would also be no default questions included. The reason again is, its easier to write a bot for pre-written questions to break security.

That said, it may be noted, I'm a security nut. The reason being that my primary job is dealing with the checkout and order back end of an ecommerce software that had a little more than 4 million dollars run through it last year alone.

That said, I've also got experience with writing store stuff, so I may include that as an addon module at some point, but that's nowhere near even being in the initial design document (though allowing ordering prints would be neat).

You used the web developer tools didn't ya? 

Some browsers will cascade the margin: auto as well as the text-align thing down into the news box. This is actually a good thing because that's how it's supposed to work. The problem being that there's a lot of browsers that do not implement that properly, and therefore a lot of people aren't used to that. Generally it's a good idea to set the alignment within every element that is displaying text, image, or some object content. That's the only way to make sure that it'll display it properly across all the different browsers.

IE also has an overflow bug, where if you have something set with a width, and set something inside of it with a width: 100%, the internal element "overflows" the container by around 15-20 pixels for no good reason. This is an IE specific bug because the box model they use is retarded. I am unsure what the fix for that was at this time though.

It's as easy as pie.

Code Select Expand

perl -p -i -e 's/target/replacement/g' $(find -name '*.htm')

The difference being that this just modifies the files directly, rather than making a copy. You should probably look into "regular expressions" as well, since you'll be using them in any sort of mass replacement on Linux (even in Xepher's version).

Right, I'd also recommend that if you're going with JS of any sort, use a framework like jQuery or Prototype. For two reasons actually. One, it makes writing custom things across browsers a hell of a lot easier (a big issue in JS), and for two there's a crap ton of additions you can get to do multiple things (like the menus Senshuu talked about) with relative ease.

I agree with Xeph though, generally it's a good idea to avoid HTML/CSS editing software as there's been many cases that I can not only write things in a more readable form, but do things that the editor just isn't capable of doing. It's generally a better idea to learn how to do it by hand, even if you still plan on using an editor, as it can really come in handy later when that software fails.

As for testing things on your machine, it's certainly possible to set up your desktop with everything you need. Perl, PHP, Apache 1.3/2.0/2.2, MySQL, etc... all can be set up to run on Windows. But the problem you face there is not so much as setting them up (some things like Apache and MySQL are actually REALLY easy to set up on Windows) but learning how to set up what you need (I.E. creating databases, granting access, etc...)

I just work directly on the server using VIM in most cases for anything (in combination with screen). That way I can make a single connection, open multiple files, and have instant results with little headaches (well that and I've got root access on the machine I do most of my work on, so when I run into a problem I can check logs and diagnose exactly what broke and why).