What is Xcomic?

Xcomic is a comic management / web comic / comic update script that fits within any site to facilitate the publishing of web comics (like Megatokyo∞ or Penny Arcade∞). Features include maximum customizability, news posting, control panel, PHP and SQL backend, XHTML/CSS compliant, and OOP design.

Why use Xcomic?

Xcomic is great for any artist seeking a solution to effectively and easily publish his or her comics or manga on the internet. The artist takes care of the images, while Xcomic provides a means to organize and display the series to a large audience. Xcomic is extremely easy to use with a control panel for posting comics and news. Comic display is also easy to customize. Pages are fully XHTML compliant and their "look" can be changed using CSS styles. Finally, Xcomic is free, open source, and easy to modify for your own use. Check out some sites using Xcomic.

Help Wanted

PHP Developer

With a stable version 0.8.3 already released, Xcomic is looking to recruit a few experienced PHP developers who are willing to help refine the existing script and also to add new features for new releases. Xcomic is a serious project and seeks to eventually become the standard for web comic publishing.

Xcomic is written in PHP with a balance between OOP design and procedural design. It currently uses a DBMS system to provide flexibility in SQL (so you must know a bit of SQL too) although future versions will move to the Pear::DB class. Some XHTML/CSS knowledge is a plus since Xcomic produces XHTML output that can be styled with CSS. CVS knowledge is also required to make changes and updates to the script.

As a developer, you will first become familiar with how Xcomic works and then work on stabilizing current features and adding new ones in the future. In preparation for version 1.0, we shall review the script line by line and then throughly test it for security. Since this is a relatively new project, you have the chance to become a lead developer and lead this project to success.

If you would like to contribute to this project (in any way), please email: squeeself [at] gmail.com OR mike [at] mikexstudios.com

Current News

From the Forums∞
As you may have noticed, the Xcomic project has been fairly idle these past months with spurts of development in the background on experimental versions which still haven't been released yet. Just so everyone knows what's going on, I'll try to give a quick summary of the status of Xcomic:

1. Still working on 0.9.0. Ocassionally, we think of a new way of implementing Xcomic so we try that. Any good changes gets merged into 0.9.0. Right now, I'm working on a multi-comic system with templating which will hopefully be merged into 0.9.0.

2. We currently have 3 developers, but all of us are immensely busy that we can barely contribute to this project. For instance, I cannot handle support requests anymore, and I ocassionally write code. Therefore, we are in need of new developers to help out. If you want to join the Xcomic group, send me an email. Positions you can apply for include: Developer, Support (helping out on the forum), Documentation writing, Website maintenance (editing the wiki for updates), and Bug Testing.

In short, don't expect any major updates for at least another few months (until the summer when I can actually get some free time). I apologize for this, and if you find a better comic management solution and switch to it, let me know! If someone has a better script, perhaps we can share ideas or even merge projects.

Michael Huynh