Question I don't think we're in kansas anymore

BCTS has lots of nice features as a result of having staff and admin coding and modifying the base Drupal coding to get exactly what they want after a decade of running their site. Some of them can be easily duplicated on Joomla, some cannot. Some things could be added if I did custom code... I'd like to avoid doing so because that means that the site ALWAYS has to have a coder available to maintain it where a site using publicly available mods will stay viable for as long as the mods continue to be updated. Other things could be added with purchase of code... and yes, the money is available for some purchases of that sort and has been used for such (so far mostly only for administrative and security based extensions).But just because something can be done, doesn't mean we can do it or afford to have it done.

Here's the problem with what you want to exist...

Say I am writing a six part story. We want part 1 to link to 2, to to have a 'back' link to 1 and a forward link to 3. 3 to have a back link to 2 and a forward link to 4... etc.

In theory, that's fine. In practical coding... how does the software know:
1. How many parts of the story there will be given that there is only one part currently being introduced to the CMS?
2. How does it place buttons/links when there is no existing article/story-part for it to show? And how does it go back and introduce those once a second part is added?
3. How does the CMS know, when I do add part 2 that it IS part 2 of something that previously exists?

BCTS handles this by allowing authors to create 'categories'. A user who becomes an author there is inherently a category of stories. Then any story they write is either a single part story under their author category, or defined as a sub-category and all the parts of that story are filed in that sub-category. Then, its easy for parts of a story to have back/next tabs... because the parts of a story are the only story/article entries in a very limited category. We actually can have back/next tabs for stories within a category... but they were turned off a while back due to a glitch... but they did NOT stay within the parts of a story... because our categories are based on timeline/collection, not on author or story arcs.

We can't duplicate that to make it easier to read a multi-part story without making it harder to read in the order that the content is released or by collection/timeline.

And this is a good example of a case where custom code would be the only option. After all, there are episodic story sites out there. There are multi-author story sites out there. There are story sites with support for community stories as well as a canon storyline. But sites with all three? Using Joomla with the specific extensions that we're using? Finding a pre-written extension to purchase is unlikely. BCTS wrote their own for Drupal... but it requires the authors setting up the stories to know how to set it up properly... or a site administrator / moderator to come in and fix things for the authors.