Comic Vineyard is a way of tracking your comic book collection using Comic Vine's functionality and data. You maintain your public collection of comics in a Comic Vine "list" and then use Comic Vineyard to take that data and turn it into a display of your choice. Comic Vineyard exists to address two of the most troubling aspects of tracking your comic book collection: getting all your data in, and getting better looking data out in a way you'd like.
The easiest way to see how this works is with an actual list.
The following comment and issue formats are acceptable:
24-30
24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30
1-5,7,11-15, 13
17-143,176; location: 4
99, 100 (3), 101-104; variants: 101C
This approach was taken to speed data entry: with most comic book trackers, you must manually visit each issue's "page" before adding it to your collection. Using the above formatting, it's much faster to update the entire Comic Vine list simply by typing new issue numbers every Wednesday (and/or adding new volumes).
In addition to the issues you own, you can optionally specify additional information in a "key: value" format separated by semi-colons (the fourth example above). These additional key values are passed to the Comic Vineyard theme and may be used as part of the display. The following key values are "known" and in-use by themes (but, again, you can use any key values you want - themes will silently ignore ones it doesn't understand): location.