The first stable release of ComicPress Manager, the management plugin for WordPress + ComicPress, is now live and available on the WP Extend site. For those who have been following the progress of this tool, you’ll find an amazing set of upgrades, changes, and bugfixes in this release. Now that I’ve learned a great deal more about writing a snappy plugin, the overall performance of your site when you have the plugin installed will be much faster. The configuration has been broken out into a separate file for easier maintenance. A large number of issues with regards to finding files on your server have been cleaned up, and compatibility with the wide varieties of PHP builds has been improved. If you’re using any older version of ComicPress Manager, I highly recommend upgrading as soon as you can.

As with all versions of the plugin, if you run into any problems or need assistance, don’t hesitate to stop by the ComicPress Support Forum.  Additionally, if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to post them here or on the forum, as well!

So yeah, if you’ve been trying to use ComicPress Manager since the stable release announcement, you’ve probably been wondering how that piece of $%@$#^ could be considered “stable.” There was one show-stopping bug in the release that I fixed…which introduced another show-stopping bug…which I just squashed today. So if you’ve been having problems with CPM ever since the 1.0 release, do yourself a favor and grab 1.0.1 right now. I promise it will work this time.

Also, I’m starting to gather together a list of upgrades for the next major milestone, 1.5. So far, the following items are up for improvement:

• Automatically chmod’ding uploaded files to the permissions of your choice
• Streamlined UI for “advanced” options
• The ability to batch rename files that have already been uploaded and have a different date prefix than the configured date prefix

Anything else that I should be considering? A reminder: CPM 2.0 is the version where I’ll be adding the ability to modify a basic ComicPress template…once that template is written, of course.

ComicPress Manager 1.1 is out, and there’s a lot of good stuff in here:

• Fixed pathfinding issues that caused comics directories and WordPress roots not to be found
• Much improved support for Yahoo! hosting and Windows/IIS hosting. And by “improved” I mean they work now
• Improved support for Internet Explorer
• Optimized page layout and reduction in JavaScript usage, which means better performance
• Improved granularity of error messages, so you know exactly what’s going wrong

Big huge thanks go out to Phil from Frumph.NET for providing a lot of debug support for Yahoo! and Windows/IIS hosting. Also big thanks to the forum members who have provided error logs, phpinfo() runs, and have stuck with ComicPress Manager through these last couple of versions. And to everyone else: If ComicPress Manager wasn’t working for you before, give it another shot now and let me know if it works or not. Most likely, the bug that was biting you has been squashed.

OK, so there were a few tiny bugs in 1.1, including one related to writing out thumbnails that had been around for a while but didn’t get exposed until after I fixed another bug. They’re now fixed, and 1.1.1 is solid as a rock. ;)  Download and install the new version today!