# TL;DR **Comix Cleric *is* a free to download software toolkit to help creators quickly setup a site made specifically for uploading, reading, and managing their comics.** Paid setup and hosting is **optional**, supports further development, and is very **very** much appreciated. **Comix Cleric *is NOT* an aggregate site for reading comics, like Webtoon.** We plan to allow you to browse for comics that opt-in to allowing us to promote them, but we will never steal traffic from our users by presenting their comics, in-full, on our main site. --- ### What the Heck is a "Comix Cleric"? Comix Cleric, if I had to give you the simplest description possible, is: like WordPress, except built specifically for webcomics. But, that doesn't really tell the whole story. ***Then, What is It Really?*** It's what we're calling a "toolkit," a collection of free & open-source software (FOSS), tools, and documentation to make web development a little less daunting for those newer to coding. We might not have built the tools ourselves, but other platforms didn't create PHP and MySQL, either. It's a SvelteKit (JavaScript) application that was specifically designed for uploading, managing, and reading webcomics! You download it, put it on a server of your choice (pending some prerequisites), and start uploading your work for others to see! It talks to a database system (kinda like MySQL) that we've preconfigured for you. In theory, you can just download the source, run a couple of basic commands and be ready to develop your own custom version of Comix Cleric. The goal is to let you focus on creating once it's live. No fiddling with plugins, no overwhelming unrelated options. You get a responsive UI that works well on desktop, tablet, and mobile, so you don't even have to think about it, readers can always see your latest updates on whatever device they have on-hand! Similar to most options out there, it has its own drawbacks as well. We'll talk about all that later. ### What Makes It Special? We're building this to be feature-complete with everything you might need to get started with uploading and hosting your own webcomic site! With this project, we are aiming to help artists find a place built just for them, where they can rest assured that the plugin won't be outdated with the next major update, or that a ToS change won't make them feel concerned about their comic not meeting the new standards or being used in training data. We want to be very open and considerate of our users. We want to offer you the ability to just download and move your project wherever you want to go next. # What is It Not? Comix Cleric is **NOT** a competitor to Webtoon or Tapas. We do not host the comics on our main site. You can download our toolkit and deploy it where you want. It has its own database and admin panel. Nothing is shared. At launch, you can **optionally** create an account on the main site (comixcleric.com) to register your comic with us for future stuff, like the web ring! There, you can also purchase setup & hosting options from us. Once again, fairly similar to WordPress. # Does It Have Drawbacks? Of course! Every web technology is going to have some issues. The web, itself, has issues. First and foremost, if you don't know basic HTML/CSS/JS, it's still not gonna help you much in terms of fully modifying the interface. The best we can do in that regard is make the code clean, simple to read, and functionally solid. It will have many admin panel controls to allow you to customize the appearance, but it was designed to make sure the site works on most devices, and that limits things a bit. There's kind of a weird collision that happens when you want to allow customization, but keep things reliable. Not everyone understands how responsive layouts work in CSS, and I would rather the site still be accessible to your readers, so things may feel a bit rigid at first. Comix Cleric may not be as extensible at the start as you may expect from something like WordPress. We want to add far deeper theme support (and *may* look into plugins, but that may be a can of worms we don't want to open). > Plugins can lead to tons of maintainability & security problems. That's an issue we're not really ready to tackle as a team. Remember: We are 4 people, only 2 of which are developers, only one of which is working on this full-time at the time of writing. We are going to make it as customizable as we can, but we'd need more time to make sure we can get that aspect right. For now, you'll have to settle for a modern template that is fairly opinionated in its design. I'm sorry about that, but there are worse things it *could* be, and we plan to fix that as soon as we can. It may have what some see as a flaw of being a very *focused* app. It is built for a single purpose, which is to host your comic(s) and allow you to share related media (characters, fan art gallery, simple blog). We don't want to overload it with things that aren't relevant to enabling that. We don't want to build WordPress again. At most, it may become portfolio-site adjacent. Things we don't currently plan to offer or support: - Ecommerce integrations (merch shops/paid digital dowloads) Things we won't offer or support: - AI... anything. (keep it out) - Google-based services (privacy concerns) ### So, How Is This Different from WordPress? Did We Really Need This? It isn't, fundamentally. If WordPress offers more flexibility for you, go for it. What we're offering is a more streamlined experience specifically for comic creators and will not cover every aspect you may want from the start. We're going to try our best to equip you with everything you could want for webcomics, but we're aware some might have different needs. We saw an outcry from people about the services they use either not being supported, or not being supportive. So, we decided to try and help out. If you don't like the idea, we totally get it, but we're still gonna try! ### How Long Do You Plan To Support It? Our Kickstarter roadmap outlines that based on what we already have done, and things that still need doing or fixing, we'll spend about another 3-4 months getting to what we call "1.0". This will not have every feature we're planning to eventually add. Things expected to end up in 1.0, at launch, can be found on the main site, in the features sections. The only one of those four sections that won't be available at launch (1.0) is the "planned features" section. That is all stuff that will be really good to add in once 1.0 is out and we can see how it's doing. > Beyond this, it's still very fuzzy, we won't know all the details until we get there. We have to make it to 1.0 first. After 1.0 is released, we will probably spend the next few (2-4) months focusing more heavily on delivering bug fixes and improvements to the existing code and custom site deployments if we have any to do. Features will be added in as we are able to get to them, but most likely a new feature will be added monthly on average (could be more or less), and those on our hosting would be able to opt-in to pre-release features. This is not to say we're going to be witholding the code from free users to punish them for not paying or something. We'd rather make sure it's all stable before we allow you to potentially brick your installation, which **is** a cause for concern when catering to creators who potentially don't know code that well. When it's on our own servers, it's easier to provide direct support and restore back-ups if something goes wrong. > If you want to help improve Comix Cleric from your own host platform, you can always reach out and see if we can get you access a preview build. You will have to accept responsibility if something breaks, though. We warned you. We want to support this as long as there is a demand for it. That being said, though, we are creators, and there will inevitably be a day where we want to focus on another project. It's unreasonable to expect us to work on it forever. We want to make sure that the project can live on as long as people want it, though. We will attempt to provide the most exhaustive documentation possible to make sure anyone can be a *Comix Cleric*, themselves. In that instance, we'd like to pass the mantle onto trusted community maintainers that can continue to keep the toolkit alive and feature-rich! ### What Happens To The Hosted Sites If ComixCleric.com Is Discontinued? If comixcleric.com ever had to shut down, any subdomain created would stop functioning eventually as well as a result. I've briefly mentioned this before, but Comix Cleric is designed to be easily portable and deployable. It would **really** suck if we had to shut down our hosting, but in that hopefully unlikely event we would provide a generous heads up to everyone, as well as leave a secure archive up allowing you to login and download your app to host it elsewhere. This will be possible even if we DON'T have to shut down, which is why we'll provide more details in our documentation at a later time. --- # Further Reading Here, we'll be getting more into the technical aspects of Comix Cleric. It's gonna be a little more *word-y*. ### Why Did You Build This At All? I've been drawing since I was very young, 3rd grade is as far back as I can recall. I had a pretty rough up-bringing. Not the worst by far, but it was not easy. I was then put into the workforce and, like most other adults, had to endure the most insufferable, greedy people. The world is a bad enough place, and it took so much to not fall victim to it. My mother always told me to be kind and treat others with the respect I would want for myself. I still try to live by that. If I do nothing else with my life, I want to make someone else's existence just a little easier. I could be doing "more important" humanitarian work, but I thought I'd start where home is, where my skills are. I do not like large corporations. I do not like what they're doing to creative people. Those people (independent creators, teams, and studios) are my friends, the people who are already working themselves to death to create all the things you love about life. I would do anything to make sure they're taken care of. Even if I can't *actually* do magic and make everything better, I'm gonna try to do what I can, while I can, with the skills and tools I aquire over my lifetime. Comic Cleric is a very small part of what I, and the rest of Panel Party, envision for better support of indies, but we are few. Your kind words and encouragement have given us so much confidence that people *will* support you when it matters. ### Will Hosting Have Catches or Stipulations? We're all for freedom of expression, here. We do have to draw a line in the sand somewhere, though. Things not protected by the first amendment, such as hatespeech and slurs (unless used appropriately in a meaningful context), are prohibited. We won't tolerate abuse to any protected group of people. We do reserve the right to make judgement calls about this. All reports will always be reviewed by a human moderator, and will go through verification with other moderators to ensure that appropriate use of terms/media is not flagged or removed without proper cause. AI generated material is **not allowed** on our hosting services. Images, Video, Text. Doesn't matter. We can't do anything about what you use your self-hosted copy for, but we won't harbor slop. We are keeping an eye on the tech as it evolves, and we have already found many recent cases where certain use of generative AI was harder to detect. We make no efforts to protect anyone. We don't care how much they pay us for hosting. We will terminate their Comix Cleric account and ask them to move elsewhere if they aggregiously violate our ToS. We want to be fair, but we will do what we have to do to keep this a safe place for artists to coexist. Ideally, regardless of circumstance, we want to provide your files back to you if you are no longer willing or able to host with us. As long as you haven't done anything actually illegal, we will allow you to request a download of your Comix Cleric app to take with you. Just due to server space limitations, we may not be able to store it long-term after deactivation to make sure those resources are free for others to use. ### Why Did You Choose These Web Technologies? > Note: This is for techincal demonstration. Comix Cleric will not **require** coding knowledge to function normally. My background is mainly in front-end development. That means I typically design and code the UI, but not much else as far as functionality. SvelteKit (JavaScript) was brought to my attention by a programmer friend a number of years ago. To my surprise, SvelteKit, even for it's potential complexity, was extremely approachable as someone who didn't really mess with JavaScript. It makes seemingly complex tasks feel almost trivial. (Maybe I just have the mind for it.) After years of working with it, and making couple of other apps, lessons were learned, and we're ready to move forward. I'm taking extra care to ensure that important operations utilize secure server-side functionality and try to follow conventions set by the creators of the web tools. I *considered* Next.js, due to it's wider adoption and support, but I'll be honest, I *really* don't like JSX. It's not terribly easy to write or read, and the component patterns just don't compute for me. > If that last thing confuses you, the handy thing about these frameworks is: similar to WordPress (yet again), the template syntax allows you to build reusable blocks of code that can accept parameters called "props". These can really be thought of like reusable chunks of HTML that will make your app code much shorter and more flexible/maintainable (in theory). Laravel (PHP) was also on the table, since I've used it to build a number of applications, as was my main introduction to web frameworks. However, for all the cool things you can do with it and its tools, it's just so cumbersome to build new routes and create migrations and setting up all of its server requirements... it's a lot. While SvelteKit is not bulletproof, and comes with drawbacks of its own (primarily the minified output), I think most newer developers will find it the most approachable once they understand the file tree. It is *very* similar to using vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. Setup requires a text editor or IDE and a Node.js installation. That should be everything you really need to start developing. *Docker may become optional before launch.* Templating is pretty easy. For a few examples of what I mean: A basic Svelte component can be as simple as something like this. ```html

{text}

``` > Fun fact: > > All styles are scoped to the file they're in. This `h1` style would not affect any other h1 in the entire app! Now you have a heading you can change the text of, but the styles are always there! It can be imported and used in any other `.svelte` file. ```html ``` If you wanted to pass even more information to the prop (like more HTML), you can "render" its contents instead. ```html

{@render children?.()}

``` Now, when using the component, you can pass whatever elements you want (as long as they are valid in HTML). ```html I am also a heading! ``` This simple templating should make it so anyone can use their existing web knowledge to start tweaking things. We'll be striving to make things easier as we go, but this seems like a great place to start! ### What Are Your Security Features? None of us here are **experts** in cyber security. That being said, we are capable of keeping track of and patching exploits as we learn about them and looking up common attack vectors. I do my best to keep project dependencies to a minimum to reduce the number of ways the project could be exploited. I've chosen to use local auth systems that have been tested and use their own data encryption patterns and role-based access. Our choice of database/authentication is heavily dependent on if the service allows us to easily control data flow based on user role. Our current choice of database does this extremely well and allows tons of control over exactly what uploaded data can be seen, by who and when. Basically, anyone not logged in (public) will see data that has been stripped down to only what needs to be seen for the site to function. Only published uploads will be visible to public users. Even if they access your API directly, if they are not logged in as the admin, they can't see any data they aren't supposed to. We are ensuring, to the best of our current abilities, that we aren't leaking data. Nothing worse than spoiling future updates! On top of that, public access is strictly read-only. This means that, once again, without proper access they can't tamper with anything. Your admin account gives you all the access you need to make adjustments to your site. We enforce an existing standard pattern for secure passwords (min: 8 characters, mixed-case, 1 number, 1 special character). We plan to finish adding support for an Authenticator app (like Aegis) as a 2FA for admin users for even more secure login. When non-admin accounts are fully implemented, they will be allowed a few priviledged operations, like creating, updating, deleting their own accounts and comments. Extensive testing will be done to make absolutely sure these accounts stay within their guardrails, which is why they *may not* be available at launch. This isn't our first time building a secure app, though. Qwitter had systems I had to build that would allow users to login/sign-up, create/delete their posts, and send in secure donations! We never stored highly sensitive data on our servers, only the minimal amount required to confirm a purchase and deliver perks (email, transaction ID, amount paid). --- # The End? I'm not entirely sure where to end this, since I'm sure it'll be updated again soon. Thanks for reading. If there was a topic here I didn't cover or cover *well enough*, please reach out on Bluesky or the Comix Cleric Discord and let me or Panel Party know!

✦ Directorium ✦

✦ Settings ✦

What is Comix Cleric? (And What it is Not)