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estiroseMy fanfic archives have existed in various and sundry places over the years, using various and sundry software. I've been looking for a piece of software to use to do everything I want in an archive.
1. I want people to find fics easily by fandom.
2. I want to be able to put together pages featuring certain universes/serials, talking about them, and then linking to the stories.
3. I want to have tags, so people can find stories featuring/containing the characters they want.
4. I want to give people warnings for stuff they don't want to click on. (For example, I have dabbled in incest and mpreg.)
5. I want it to be flexible, so I can add fandoms, characters, universes, and such easily.
6. I want to make it easy to add stories.
Having been working with AO3 (and at some point, going to learn how to code for it), I've been leaning heavily towards the "all tags" approach to categorization. I'm archiving a lot on AO3, but I wanted to also be able to create pages as #2 above.
I'm on my fourth formal archive (Multific, Ghostly, Inkwell, and another archive), and two test archives (Estinose and Shiny). Multific was hand-coded, which was kind of clunky; Inkwell and it's predecessor were on eFiction (3.0 and 2.0 respectively), which is specialized for fanfic archives, and Ghostly uses Wordpress (blogging). Estinose is on Dreamwidth, and Shiny uses the CMS software Drupal.
Each of my current archives that I've used has limitations. eFiction is great as long as you don't want to create pages for universes. Wordpress has limited serial stories support. Hand-coding isn't very easy.
So, now I'm testing out Drupal, which has "books" (allowing me to put stories in sequence and give them their own overarching pages), and Dreamwidth's tagging system. What drove me to try Drupal is that I've used it before, I'm familiar with it, and its taxonomy system allows me to create both freeform tags and use predefined tags, and do multiple categories (the whole thing shows up as tags to the end-user). I'm also trying the same thing with Dreamwidth, though the fact that I'm having to hand-type tags, and the size of the Dreamwidth tags space, and the fact I'm using a lot of tags, makes it a bit frustrating.
Here's what I've got on Shiny, which is my attempt at making things easier:
This is my entry page, both empty and filled-out versions:
If you look at the full versions, which you can click on the thumbnails to see, you can tell I've got certain things like the fandoms, length, warnings, and the whole gen/het/slash thing set up so I can easily enter them. The story in the second part is just waiting for some HTML code that I want to add in. I can easily add in things like characters, universes, and notes (like "crossover") so that people can read them. You're supposed to be able to select multiple tags on the end-user end, but I don't know how to do that yet in Drupal. Yet.
I can nestle things so that they show up as sub-categories, as well:
As you can tell, this is the fandom category. (I suspect it will also serve, as Ghostly's equivalent does, as the place I will put my Original Character fics, though I don't know yet.)
The only trouble I'm running across with Shiny is a category count; you can't easily tell how many fics are in a certain "category" (because there are, of course, no categories; they're all tags, even the fandoms!). I figure I'll just keep reading the documentation for Drupal and/or have a manual update on the main page (which is a small price to pay).
Will either Estinose or Shiny work out? I don't know. I'm willing to play around with them for a while, though!
1. I want people to find fics easily by fandom.
2. I want to be able to put together pages featuring certain universes/serials, talking about them, and then linking to the stories.
3. I want to have tags, so people can find stories featuring/containing the characters they want.
4. I want to give people warnings for stuff they don't want to click on. (For example, I have dabbled in incest and mpreg.)
5. I want it to be flexible, so I can add fandoms, characters, universes, and such easily.
6. I want to make it easy to add stories.
Having been working with AO3 (and at some point, going to learn how to code for it), I've been leaning heavily towards the "all tags" approach to categorization. I'm archiving a lot on AO3, but I wanted to also be able to create pages as #2 above.
I'm on my fourth formal archive (Multific, Ghostly, Inkwell, and another archive), and two test archives (Estinose and Shiny). Multific was hand-coded, which was kind of clunky; Inkwell and it's predecessor were on eFiction (3.0 and 2.0 respectively), which is specialized for fanfic archives, and Ghostly uses Wordpress (blogging). Estinose is on Dreamwidth, and Shiny uses the CMS software Drupal.
Each of my current archives that I've used has limitations. eFiction is great as long as you don't want to create pages for universes. Wordpress has limited serial stories support. Hand-coding isn't very easy.
So, now I'm testing out Drupal, which has "books" (allowing me to put stories in sequence and give them their own overarching pages), and Dreamwidth's tagging system. What drove me to try Drupal is that I've used it before, I'm familiar with it, and its taxonomy system allows me to create both freeform tags and use predefined tags, and do multiple categories (the whole thing shows up as tags to the end-user). I'm also trying the same thing with Dreamwidth, though the fact that I'm having to hand-type tags, and the size of the Dreamwidth tags space, and the fact I'm using a lot of tags, makes it a bit frustrating.
Here's what I've got on Shiny, which is my attempt at making things easier:
This is my entry page, both empty and filled-out versions:
If you look at the full versions, which you can click on the thumbnails to see, you can tell I've got certain things like the fandoms, length, warnings, and the whole gen/het/slash thing set up so I can easily enter them. The story in the second part is just waiting for some HTML code that I want to add in. I can easily add in things like characters, universes, and notes (like "crossover") so that people can read them. You're supposed to be able to select multiple tags on the end-user end, but I don't know how to do that yet in Drupal. Yet.
I can nestle things so that they show up as sub-categories, as well:
As you can tell, this is the fandom category. (I suspect it will also serve, as Ghostly's equivalent does, as the place I will put my Original Character fics, though I don't know yet.)
The only trouble I'm running across with Shiny is a category count; you can't easily tell how many fics are in a certain "category" (because there are, of course, no categories; they're all tags, even the fandoms!). I figure I'll just keep reading the documentation for Drupal and/or have a manual update on the main page (which is a small price to pay).
Will either Estinose or Shiny work out? I don't know. I'm willing to play around with them for a while, though!
