Welcome to Comic Vine 2.0 - phew
By Captain Cascader 15 Comments
Enter Shelby Bonnie and Mike Tatum, two Clark Kent style nice-guys, who saved Comic Vine in the non-comic, non-dramatic way of just taking us in and asking what we needed help with. We needed two more guys. Specifically two guys we'd worked with before at CNET: Andy McCurdy and Sean Coonce. Amazingly, they wanted to work with us again too. Go figure. In any case, we had our team and now had a couple options for what to do about Comic Vine...
- Ignore the problem, people seemed to like comicvine, why touch it?
- Throw some more servers at it and add new features on the current php architecture.
- The Andy McCurdy solution.
Andy is the smartest programmer I know. He had ideas... BIG ideas. He wanted to rebuild the site from scratch and use some programming language named after a dead gypsy. Knowing Andy the way we did, we all did the right thing and rejected him outright. Andy of course didn't relent, and after a week of him telling us we were idiots (we were), we'd all agreed to build the new comicvine completely from scratch with a language none of us had ever used. Luckily we picked up this cat named Jacob Kaplan-Moss who literally wrote the book on Django to help us out.
Skip 5 months to now and the site is finally up. It definitely wasn't an easy build. Forget the fact that we were using a new language, for some reason or another our designer (cough cough) decided that the entire site needed to be void of forms and use insane amounts of javascript to allow users to finally live the dream of editing a structured wiki in-page. I'm pretty happy with it. I know there are gonna be huge bugs to deal with over the next couple weeks, but it's nothing we can't fix and I think the reward of just being able to hit that edit link and have an awesome editor appear are worth it.
As for the site itself. Well, it's different, but hopefully the same as well. We definitely didn't want to mess with things that weren't broken. To me, the most important thing was the community. To that end, the way we figured we could best help the site was to make the tools that the community used to edit the site that much better. While I'm sure it's a little buggy at the moment, I hope you agree with me that our edit tools are pretty amazing. I don't wanna make any grand statements, but we're definitely pushing some new ideas onto the table as far as what a user submission system should look like.
I won't rant too much longer, as I'm sure I'll add many more paragraphs to this post below answering your questions. Please tell us what you think and know that this is just the beginning. There's a lot more in store for this site and this team in the next couple months. For now though, thanks to everyone who remembers Comic Vine 1.0, especially our moderators and power users, who make this site what it is.