John Bintz has just been programming his little heart out with the ComicPress Manager Plugin, ever since its release with the ComicPress 2.5 theme. This is a fantastic plugin, becoming a real must-have for ComicPress users… and he has just been packing in features and compatibility in a race to a 1.0 version of the plugin. So if you are running ComicPress I suggest you go give it a try and report back any trouble you run into or additional things you would like to see it do here in this forum thread.

Much thanks from the ComicPress community to John, I know we are rooting for a solid 1.0 release and appreciative of his dedicated effort!

Featured Site: Little Gamers
ComicPress Version: 2.5
Modifications: Heavy

Pontus Madsen got a head start moving Little Gamers to WordPress with ComicPress with an early release of the latest theme but the task of importing nine years of comics. If there was anyone that was going to thoroughly customize the theme it would be Mr. Madsen and company, who also co-created the ComicPress bookmark feature with Ash Young.

The site design is very clean and white, perhaps a bit light on some people’s eyes but on the other hand it is very slick and really lets the comic pop. The top bar expands to reveal the comic bookmark buttons, along with a “Share” feature in development and details of the Arronav feature. The Arronav allows you to toggle through the archives with your left and right arrow key, very intuitive and is a feature that could catch on with more sites using it (much like the bookmarking feature)… Mr. Madsen had mentioned releasing it to the ComicPress community at some point. Another custom feature added is found on the archives page. Nine years is a long listing to have on a single archives page, so instead you get a listing of the years that dynamically expand when clicked. Nice work guys.

WordPress 2.6 | Release Notes | Download

Got a surprise yesterday when WordPress 2.6 was released a month early. It’s not quite the jump 2.5 was but it’s got some nice new features added this round includes post edit history (call back a previously saved version), captions on embedded images, Press This! bookmark to quickly blog about a Web page, Google Gears to allow more of the admin weight to be handled by your local browser and theme previewing before going live.

I’ve tested it out with ComicPress 2.5 and seem to have run into trouble with the “random comic” widget, but that’s it so far, I’ll look into what might be causing that.

As with any new version of WordPress there will undoubtedly be a bug fix version to come out shortly after the mass user base puts the release in action, so you can get it early (if you don’t mind sacrificing random comic for now), and be willing to work around any potential bugs (even contribute to bug reporting) or play it safe and wait for the 2.6.1.

Here’s the video demonstrating the new features in this release: