ComicPress 2.5 | Demo | Read Me | Download
(Requires WordPress 2.5 or later)

I am quite proud to announce the release of version 2.5 of ComicPress. For me, this is the most exciting release yet. At first look you may not notice a huge change from 2.1, however, this version has been rewritten from the ground up. All the CSS styling, queries and functions, rewritten for simplicity, stability and added features.

Most exciting to you, will most likely be the availability of 5 layouts:

1. Standard Edition — this is the layout you are familiar with, a single blog column and a single sidebar under the comic. Works well with a horizontal or full-page comic.
2. 3-Column Edition — indeed, the much anticipated 3-column version, a wider page than the Standard Edition this layout also gives you a second sidebar to fill.
3. Vertical Edition — for those of you with a narrow or tall comic, perhaps a stacked 4 panel or mini-comic page, this is the layout for you. It looks like the standard layout, but in this one the sidebar comes up beside the comic, filling in the extra space.
4. Vertical 3-Column Edition — just as the 3-column does for the Standard Edition, this layout ads an extra sidebar to the Vertical Edition, so the comic gets sandwiched between the two sidebars.
5. Graphic Novel Edition — this takes the Standard Edition, which can work well for large-full page comics, and ads an extra sidebar to the left that extends up beside the comic. This allows you to display stuff alongside your large full-page comics. Can also be used for those wanting a third column added to the Standard Edition but who’s comic is not wide enough to span then wider layout.

Each layout is just a small variation of each other to get you started. Again, with the CSS written from the ground up, you won’t find the confusing styles of the earlier versions based on the WordPress default theme. This theme has been written for you, to find and edit all the elements of your site much easier. If you have been holding off customizing the theme, this would be a good time for you to get your hands dirty. I’ve worked hard to keep it looking good out of the box (especially for Firefox 3), but keeping basic for changing it as well. Styles have been organized and defined in simple terms covering all the areas of the site you might want to change, including a separate class for the front page comic post (I know a lot of you like to style that a bit different to set it apart from the blog).

A couple features were added as well to take advantage of WordPress 2.5

• Gallery — WordPress 2.5 has a media library to give you better control of your uploaded images, you can add several to a post or page (not necessarily embedded on the page) and then place a gallery on the page which will allow you to navigate through the images. Might be useful for bonus material such as sketches and wallpaper.
• Gravatars — to make comments more fun and personalized, visitors can now have an avatar appear with their post much like in a forum, these work with their e-mail and are handled offsite so you don’t need to host avatars and they don’t need to be registered users to have one. They work across all WordPress/Gravatar supported sites/blogs.

ComicPress Manager

One of the best new features is not even in ComicPress, it is a new plugin written exclusively for the ComicPress theme by John Bintz. This plugin will add a ComicPress management interface to your WordPress Administration panel. From there you will be able to configure the theme and upload comics. When you upload a comic it will also create the post to go with it. In fact, you can upload several comics to batch post them far into the future. Or even better, if you have a large existing archive, you can now painlessly allow it to make all the comic posts for you. It can do other maintenance to such as deleting comic files and their associated post, or checking for comic files that do not have a post. This is a great new tool for any ComicPress user. It is still in its early development, but has been running solid from my own experience with it. Go here to download it now!

Upgrading From Older Versions of ComicPress

This is a great time for a new user to try out ComicPress, especially if you have been holding off on trying to customize the CSS or have not wanted to switch over a large archive of comic files. This is also a good time to upgrade (you’ll see why in the full feature/change list below). To upgrade I recommend first upgrading to WordPress 2.5.1, then you will need to make the necessary changes to fix the navigation (to keep the site running while you set up the new theme, or just run the out of the box version of ComicPress 2.5 during that time). Then upload the new theme to a folder separate from the existing ComicPress theme. Next get this plugin and activate it, this will allow you to work on and view the new theme while visitors continue to see the old one. Theme customizing is so much easier with this release not only will you be able to quickly adapt, but probably do some layout customizations that you gave up on before. Finally, when it’s ready, just deactivate the Theme Tester plugin and you will be publishing your comics with the best ComicPress yet.

Special Thanks…

This release was sponsored in part by Sketch Magazine. We want to thank them for their generous contribution to the project which in turn is a contribution to the online comic community. Also much thanks to those that have donated during the development phase of this release. Your support was greatly appreciated and helped make this release a reality as there was a lot of time and work involved. Also thanks to those beta testers in the forum that helped polish the final release. And once again, a big thanks to Sketch Magazine… I think we share a mission…

“Sketch Magazine’s goals are aimed toward enhancing the comics art form, and others, through education and knowledge. We offer creators artistic tips and techniques that help them to enjoy working in this field.” — Robert W Hickey

Complete list of changes and updates after the fold…

1. Config — there is now a specific config file, so you don’t have to mess with the functions file to set your options. You can upgrade to a newer functions file without resetting your options.
2. Stylesheet — the style.css file has been rewritten from the ground up, keeping it at a bare minimum. Clean, simple and organized.
3. Floating Columns — the column and sidebar(s) all float left without margins, making them stackable. In doing so it’s easy to swap them around, for example, this ComicPress site is just the 3-Column version with the center column DIV swapped with the left-sidebar DIV, putting both sidebars on the same side. They are more easily scalable to as the contents inside the columns all scale to the size of the columns, so you just need to set the outer colum widths (and the page DIV width to make sure it fits the columns. They are also set to hide overflow, so if something appears inside them wider than they are, it will hide the extra stuff rather than break the layout.
4. Easy To Read Code — the contents of the template files are tabbed out, keeping it easy to see the different parts of the site at a glance and find the DIV’s and Classes you want to change or rearrange. DIV’s spanning across multiple template files was avoided as much as possible. #Header, #menubar, #comic, #page and #footer are all independent of each other for more control in styling.
5. Menu — The menu bar now autmatically includes any pages created in wordpress. If you would like to set the links yourself, its easy to do right in the header.php file just putting your links within <li> and </li>
6. Comic Area — the comic image is easier to adjust with it’s HTML code being pulled from the functions to the page area, it has been moved off header.php to index.php and single.php for simplicity and more control. The title of the post has been added to the img’s title and alt for greater visibility in Web image searches.
7. Comic Post — the frontpage post that goes with the comic has its own easy to modify CSS class… (.post-frontpage) making it easier to style it apart from the rest of the blog. The post also borrows from the comic query to cut down on database queries.
8. Navigation — navigation had to be changed somewhat due to a WordPress 2.5 bug, where it lost the ability to exclude categories from navigation. Now navigation just navigates within the same category, which actually keeps things simple and opens up room for creating additional special categories like the comics category (you just have to make sure all your comics are in the comics category now). The top navigation query in the header.php is more self contained, making it more solid for relocating.
9. Comment Gravatars — the Gravatars function has been enabled for comics, so visitors can now have an avatar display with their comment.
10. Gallery — a new template file (image.php) can now be used to create a gallery, being able to navigate through a series of images in a post or page with thumbnail navigation buttons.
11. Frontpage Blog — the query for the frontpage blog has been entirely rewritten. Now rather than going to the previous post, you can go back to a previous page of posts much like a standard WordPress blog.
12. Random Comic Widget — is now created on the fly instead of at page load, this is not only more fun, but works when you are using a cache plugin.
13. Comic Bookmark Widget — this widget has been modified, first the popup window has better styling and more accurate placement. Also, it only displays on comic pages like it should, and if you are on the frontpage of your site, it will bookmark the permalink to the latest comic, and not just to your frontpage url.
14. Queries — queries have been rewritten throughout the theme, to both optimize them and make sure they don’t step on each other.
15. More stuffs — and I’m sure it will come to me later…
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This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 11:06 am 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.