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ComicPress Update = New Features

February 20th, 2009 by Oskar Kennedy

After a few hours of digging around in the guts of the site, I managed to upgrade my ComicPress theme to the new version, while maintaining the look of the old version. The upgrade took a lot of the style elements out, in favor of a much more sparse palette. It took a good amount of prodding to get all of the old design features working with the new functionality. A competent coder probably could have done the job in an hour. It took me a few midnight feedings over the last week.

ComicPress 2.7 adds some fabulous new features to the mix, so the work was worth it. They might not be immediately obvious, though, so I thought I’d note them for the benefit of the curious.

Storyline Support. ComicPress can now use the WordPress category structure to create sub-categories of comics. Now, if you want to read all of the journal comics without skipping past all the ridiculous gag strips, you can just click on the Journal Comics link below the strip, and they’ll come up on their very own page.
Hovertext for Comics. Up until now, the alt text that showed up when you moused over the comic was the title of the post. Now I will have to think of another interesting thing to say for each post. Call it another frequent opportunity for failure.
Strip Transcripts. This is a great feature, that allows me to add a searchable transcript of the words in each comic, so you can find a strip if you remember a bit of the dialogue. It will be really handy once I get transcripts entered for all the past strips, which should happen in about a month or six.
Threaded Comments. ComicPress now supports the threaded comments feature in WordPress. If you click on the Reply link at the bottom right of a comment, your reply will show up below the comment you’re responding to, instead of going down at the bottom.
New Headers. Okay, this bit was my handiwork. I figured out how to put different graphics at the top of the main page, as well as individual posts, pages and archive pages. I’d probably be less proud of that if I was even a half-decent programmer, but… well, see above.

So please, poke around a bit and let me know what you think. If you like stuff, or find anything wonky, feel free to leave a comment.

Also, if you’re looking to publish a halfway professional looking webcomic, and you’ve got WordPress installed, go download ComicPress 2.7. The theme and the ComicPress Manager plugin will do everything but write and draw the strip for you. A decent looking site won’t make up for a half-assed comic, but it couldn’t hurt.

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