This past week, I've been working on the most difficult coding project I have undertaken for Anime Characters Database in the past 2 years.

I got an email a few weeks ago that led to the expanding of Media Types* from just Anime and Games to Anime, Hentai Games, Video Games, OVA, Movie, Artist Original, and etc.

While doing data entry on ACDB off of Wikipedia pages... I've been constantly nagged by how Wikipedia deals only with Franchises, and lists the spin offs (Anime Seasons, Manga, Movies, OVA's, Games, and whatever else) to the side.

On ACDB, I want not only to sort everything into franchises, but also to provide complete feature sets for every spin off.

For example, we now have episode blogs for anime, but we can also easily have blogs for manga volumes, blogs for manga chapters, blogs for movies, OVAs, games.


So, to get this ball rolling, it's critical that I make a trusted, simple, easy to use, one click does all, Franchise manger.


And thus, franchise.php is the focus of my efforts. The number of features packed into this tool is already mind boggoling (for me at least. hah).



You start off browsing the DB. Say you land on Slayers Try ( this third season of Slayers ), and you want to make it into a franchise.

Click -START FRANCHISE PROCESS-, and it loads up the franchise manager. Click a confirmation button, then behind the scenes, it'll duplicate the page you were looking at, set it as the parent franchise, and assign the first spin off to it. From here, you can search for works in the DB you want to assign to the franchise. Click on button, and they are added. You can then assign characters from one series to the next by selecting the corresponding To and From values and clicking Inherit. ( I'll be coding a character manager into this soon as well, for fine tunning. Like, while a lot of characters in Naruto are also in NS, not all of them are. So you'd want to kick those out, one by one. )

Now, I also have a concept of a center of gravity. ALL characters revolve around the parent franchise. This way here, we don't have any characters from Bleach getting mistakenly assigned to Naruto, nor do we get any dangling characters should someone unassign all characters from all spin offs. Whenever the Franchise goes Nova, all unique child characters are sucked into the void.


When will this tool be available for all members to use? Hmm, sometime 2009. I'll start a beta test on the live site sometime this month. Working out bugs, and coding a reliable "change history" will be necessary before I'll consider it field ready.








Defintions
Media Type: This is a categorization of a character source. It could be an anime, game, manga, hentai game, video game, artist, etc.
Publisher: I use publisher to loosely refer to the anime or media type a character is from.

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？