ComicPress 2.1 | Documentation | Download

It is with warmest regards I present you the long-awaited version 2.1 of the ComicPress theme. While not sporting the amount of visual change that came with the 2.0 update, this version has several small operational things that I wish were present in the 2.0 version. It has been tested to work with the latest 2.3 version of WordPress.

New Features

• Widget Support
  The release of WordPress 2.2 offered widgets as a standard part of the package and no longer just a plugin. With the new widget support you can now swap around and add items to your sidebar visually from the WordPress Admin Panel. As well as being able to download WordPress widgets online, ComicPress comes with a few comic specific widgets including: Comic Bookmark, Latest Comics, Archive Dropdown and Random Comic.
• Tag Support
  The release of WordPress 2.3 also came with a new present, the Tagging system. Rather than cluttering your Category system, you can now tag both comic and blog posts with key words.
• Improved Archive System
  The same “Comic Archive” template page is included with this release but some improvements have been made to the archive components that take advantage of WordPress’ built-in archive system. Monthly archive pages now sort in ascending date order (as well as search results) and feature some visual enhancements making the exploration of the archives by month more enjoyable.

Changes/Fixes

• Welcome Message On New Setup
  Previously if you had the ComicPress theme freshly installed with no posts in the comic category the theme style was broken. That error has been replaced with a “Welcome” placeholder until a comic post is made, keeping the theme look intact.
• Style Sheet Cleanup
  Another pass was taking at compacting, cleaning up and organizing the style sheet to make it a bit simpler for you to customize.
• New Previous Blog Post Link
  Previously there was a link on the main page below the blog posts that said “more” and just linked you to an archive page of the blog category. The new link says “Previous” and brings you to the actual blog post previous to the last one listed.
• Footer Adjustment
  The footer CSS has been adjusted to make it easier for you to color and customize the footer. To accomplish this a separate DIV was created to run above footer that makes sure it “clears” the content and sidebar columns.
• IE Comment Fix
  The comments had a 30 pixel left margin in Internet Explorer, there was no setting in the style sheet for this but rather it was IE’s own default style causing it. So a style was created to clear that margin and force IE to display comments flush left as seen in other browsers.

I’ve decided to no longer develop the original Classic Edition and therefore the Blogging Edition becomes the default edition (if someone does not want a separate blog, they can always just not make any blog posts). I will however be releasing some more flavors of version 2.1, they will provide the exact same functionality, but have some variations in the theme layout, to give some of you a head start in getting the layout the way you want it.

I know many of you have struggled with setting up a 3-column theme, so the first flavor will be a 3-column version. After that I’ll focus at setting up a good starting point for those of you with “tall” format comics. If there is a specific layout you would like to see, let me know in the comments or forum.

Upgrading?
Yeah, that’s a tricky subject around here. It’s hard to upgrade to a new version of a theme that you have previously customized into your own theme. So with any upgrade to ComicPress (which are minimal) you need to decide if you want to start with the new ComicPress version and customize it to your look, which is ideal if you were planning on cleaning it up or redoing the design a bit anyway. Or if you would rather manually make any of the updates/changes to your existing theme that you feel it would benefit from. If you chose the latter and need some assistance on making those changes (are unable to make them by comparing the new theme files) just post the changes you want to make in the forum and I’ll do my best to write up a tutorial for you to do so as soon as possible.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Theme Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.