Featured Site: Zip & Li’l Bit
ComicPress Version: 2.0 BE
Modifications: Heavy

Here’s an example of another site I had a hand in, once again, the design itself was completely done by the creator. Once you learn how to move the code around without breaking things, and get a firm grasp on CSS, pretty much any layout should be possible.

Zip and Bit is a unique case, perhaps explaining how it works could give some of you an idea of how to do things with a similar situation. Trade writes the Zip and Bit stories as books (around 60 pages) and then publishes them online a page at a time, twice a week. One book is complete and one was just starting so he wanted two sites set up nearly identical (just some color and header changes). So both sites were created in subfolders of the main domain, separate WordPress installs. The current developing story uses WordPress’ feature to publish the blog to the root directory, so going to the root domain URL gives you the current page of the current story. However, the subfolder name was added to the permalink structure, so that all the permalinks act like they are going to the subfolder. This way, if another book and subfolder are added in the future, this story can be moved back to it’s subfolder and all the permalinks will stay the same.

One nice touch Trade has always done that I think is great, is having a zoom feature on his lovely artwork. You can click on any panel of a comic to view a double-sized version of it. From this view mode you can now navigate the comic as well, panel at a time, making use of a Lightbox plugin.

Finally, the archive was also modified to something more suitable to a book, since Trade’s comics are more page based than name based, and have a set number that is not too high, the archive template file was changed to list the comics in page order as well as including handy thumbnails of each of page. Makes for a nice way to look at the whole book at a glance or find the exact page you are looking for.

I have a bucket full of bookmarks to great Webcomic sites built with the ComicPress theme that I need to share. I think I’ll make it a regular Friday feature here so we can get through some of them.

Seeing these sites gives new users an idea of what they can do as far as site design, layout and features. The ComicPress theme has a nice clean look and layout, but it’s also a nice simple and basic layout to build on and customize. For those just learning how to move some of the code around or experimenting with CSS for the first time, seeing these sites gives them some ideas. Also using Firefox with the Web Developer Toolbar and CSS Viewer you can view the style sheet and hover the CSS elements of the sites to see how the site accomplished certain feats.

Hopefully it will be a great way to learn from each other as well as showcase some excellent work by you guys. And by the way, some of you guys have done some awesome stuff and beautiful layouts. See you tomorrow.

Yes! I found a great comment solution for myself! The WordPress plugin: Comment Timeout.

I like having comments, it’s a fun added feature for readers, gives an added sense of community and sometimes even has nice feedback… for today’s comic. After that they move into the archive, where new readers might drop a comment or two, but the discussions are not active so it doesn’t really matter, also they become a good target for spambot comments. The worst is when I went on hiatus for a bit, the most recent comic racking up about 400 comments until I closed it, mostly from becoming basically a chatroom.

To me, for my Webcomic, a daily feature, the real value in the comments is for that day. The discussions are quite possibly even only relative to that day. Even my blog posts at my comic tend to be posts that are timely and only current discussion is necessary. That may be different for some sites, like this ComicPress site, it has some tips and features that are basically timeless. Some of the discussions can be ongoing. Someone might find this very post a year from now and make a mention of another plugin that would be helpful for this very thing.

But with my Webcomic site, I’ve decided I want the comments closed after the moment has passed. I’ve considered just removing the comments code from the theme’s single.php file, so that no comments would even show up in the archive. But I decided I didn’t want to do that just yet, I’d leave the comments in there as added content. I also don’t want to have to manually close hundreds of posts, and then remember every day to close older posts.

This is where this WordPress plugin has come in handy, it’s called Comment Timeout. You can set comments to close on posts after a certain amount of time, I figure 2 or 3 days gives people a chance to get there’s in. If it was a weekly comic maybe you’d want it to close after 7 or even 14 days. There’s other options as well, like not closing if people are still actively posting comments to the post, or if the post is “popular”.

It’s a nifty plugin if you only want to keep current discussion on your site and your archive is getting big and becoming a net for collecting old comments that clutter and bog down the database.

ComicPress developer Tyler Martin (aka me) has been interviewed by Scott Kurtz for his brand new podcast, Webcomics Confidential, which is a personal one-on-one discussion with the “movers and shakers” in the Webcomics community. Tyler talks a little bit about getting into Webcomics as well as ComicPress. Scott also hosts the informative Webcomics Weekly podcast along with his comrades from Halfpixel.

Featured Site: PvP
ComicPress Version: We’ll say 2.1
Modifications: Medium

Scott and I joke that the version he is running on his site is something like ComicPress 2.0-432pvp_beta3. Really, you can thank him for the recent release of 2.1 that I had gotten sidetracked from finishing up. He came to me for some assistance in switching his site over to WordPress with the ComicPress theme and his new design… along the way, while sending him new little snippets of code here and there, I finished up the 2.1 theme… and everyone benefits.

Scott had the design basically ready to insert into the corresponding areas of the template pages. A little tweaking was needed to adjust the navigation buttons the way he wanted them, as well as removing the extra comments and post information code, as his site runs comment free. The greatest challenge here was switching over a 3000+ archive of comics, and keeping the site running smoothly with the large traffic. The original database was in Textpattern and WordPress’ built in Textpattern importer did most of the work, just needing a few corrections and additions. That’s too many comics to work well for the built-in archive template page ComicPress comes with, but the new PvP site proves that it’s not necessary, instead just relying on the streamlined calendar and monthly archives dropdown, allowing anyone to preview comics through any month or arriving at any date they chose. As far as the traffic, WordPress and the ComicPress theme prove to handle the traffic more speedily than ever, with or without the extra page caching.

Nicely done on the colors and design for the new face of PvP, Scott. (As well as paving the way with some involuntary beta testing of ComicPress 2.1 ).

*Information based on time of article. As always, sites are prone to upgrades and redesigns.