Unfortunately Archie Comics has become a quite boring company at this point. I understand that the market is different and that there might be less interest for traditional Archie comics, but I would still try to publish a monthly title with new stories. Digests are boring.

Also...10 variants for this single issue you mentioned? WTH! Stop the variants nonsense!

I am happy to see that this project is continuing and I look forward to testing it. 

Quote from: PTF on May 09, 2025, 08:25:25 PMSo I guess it has to include all the horror comics, too, huh?

Yes, I'll also include pages relating to the Archie Horror issues. I'm not into that at all, but it's still relevant for documenting everything relating to Archie. I'll probably also include pages for non-Archie titles published by the company such as the Sonic and TMNT things they published for a while (especially since they even did an "Archie meets the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" issue)

So I guess it has to include all the horror comics, too, huh?

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on May 06, 2025, 11:34:46 AMWill there be anything regarding shipping? Pairing one character with another, whether canonical or not? Sources from canon, list of ship names, stats regarding how popular that the ship is, etc.

I'm not planning on anything like that.

Will there be anything regarding shipping? Pairing one character with another, whether canonical or not? Sources from canon, list of ship names, stats regarding how popular that the ship is, etc.

Almost done adding properties now. Still have some more I want to add - ones for brother/sister and son/daughter, as well as one for album (for songs) and one for who portrayed someone (TV shows/movies), but that won't take long at all (it only takes a few seconds to add a new property - create a page, add the text along with the special code to specify what type it is and save).

After that, I'll work on the templates and forms, then start adding content.

Other stuff in the works (low priority): Allowing you to sign up or login with your Facebook or Google accounts.

Note that you will need to register separately on the wiki if you want to edit anything or post on the talk pages (see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Talk_pages if you don't know what a talk page is). I may also add more social stuff like article comments, polls, etc. at some point, but the main focus for now is the content.

Playing around with some more things tonight. The forms thing I added makes it quite easy to create a new page with structure. I will need to tweak some template code after creating the templates to get them to display things the way I want, but that should be fairly easy.

Some other things will need to be tweaked if we want to use dark mode, but I can always look into that later. While I prefer dark mode, at this point I'm more interested in getting the site up and running - we can worry about tweaking the look later.

I will have more free time this weekend to play with things but it's going along nicely at this point.

About done adding properties for now and will work on the templates/forms in the coming days.

I'm also still playing with the design and options for mobile users as well, plus a few additional addons that add more useful Wikipedia-style features (short descriptions and popup article previews when you hover over an article link).

Hopefully things should be ready to go live in the next week or two.

Quick status update...

I added a template from Wikipedia that allows us to do the "This article is about X. For Y, see Other Article" text at the top of an article page. While I am trying to avoid Wikipedia templates as much as possible due to their complexity (and the fact that a lot of the code is written specifically with Wikipedia in mind, so it includes stuff we'd never need or use), but this one is too useful to pass up. I may also add a related one ("X redirects here. For Y, see Article") as that doesn't require a whole lot of extra work.

I added a contact page to the wiki. I may have to change some settings to combat spam, but we'll see how that goes.

I began the licensing stuff again on the wiki. This is what allows a user to choose a licensing option when uploading a file. It's a two-step process. The first step involves creating a list of templates to be used, while the second is actually creating these templates. I'm still debating on what options we actually need - I want to keep it as simple as possible while still allowing a wide range of available content (like Wikipedia, I want the images of actual people to be freely licensed so we don't have to worry about who owns the rights and whether we can use that image).

I'm still playing around with some addons for the wiki software. I've enabled a feature that will allow you to change the title of the page (so we can do "Title #x" instead of "Title/x" on issue pages - you can't use # in the URLs because that's used to link to a specific location on a page, so making issues sub-pages of the main article on the series seems like the most logical solution). I also installed an addon that uses that specified display title for all links to that page on the wiki, and have a few more ideas I want to play with as I have time.

I'm still playing with properties on the test site. This is a special feature added by an extension called Semantic MediaWiki that makes things a whole lot more powerful. For instance, on an issue page we can do [[Cover art::Harry Lucey]] then easily generate a sortable list of all articles about issues with cover art by Harry Lucey. I need to see if I should create a separate property for each role (writer, pencils, inks, etc.) or if I can just have a generic "Creator" property and further specify their role from there.

I do need to create a few specialty templates as well for indicating content that is used from another source such as Wikipedia, GCD or another site with the same license, since the license requires you to credit the source (which is perfectly reasonable of course - our wiki is using the same license as well), but some of those I can grab from other sources and modify as needed.