Download ComicPress 2.9 (BETA) Here

Remember, the support for 2.9 is limited to reporting buts at http://bugs.comicpress.org/

- Phil (Frumph)

At the end of Nov. 2009 Danny Burleson joined us in helping with revamps of various config sections.  Welcome Danny!  We’ll get you up to speed with adding features in no time.

Changes since 2.8

• Child Themes
• ComicPress Silver is now a child theme and the main ComicPress theme has barebones CSS
• Additional Child Themes are available on comicpresspremium.com
• ComicPress Options Revamp, 25+ new configuration options.
• 3 new layouts.
• A  complete overhaul of the innerds of the ComicPress Options variables and how they work inside the code.
• Several new ComicPress Widgets and some very important cleanups as well as new functionality.
• Navigation has been cleaned up and enhanced, you can now walk chapters as well as dates.
• Default navigation is reverted to a text-version.
• ComicPress Archive Dropdown widget has a bunch of new options inside the widget.
• Language Translation is available for all facets of hardcoded text.
• Can now separate the blog posts to 2 distinct authors.
• BuyPrint code and template cleaned up and fixed from the additional shipping problems with a flag in the options.
• Option for keeping the blog posts to stay on the archive pages, (best to use with comments off).  Additionally you can configure it to show all the blogposts between the comic from the current to the next.
• Avatars, you can specify a set of avatars for your commenters who do not have gravatars.
• A whole suite of debugging code to verify your ComicPress installation and if it’s installed correctly.
• The displaying of the comics in a comic category from the archive has been modified output-wise to be mini-thumbed.
• An extensive new set of body classes are available that include the time of day, week, layout, member and more.
• WordPress 2.9 thumbnail code is implemented, have fun playing with that for each post!
• Overhall of all the Templates and including a new This Month of Comics template.
• Over 5 various different bug fixes from 2.8
• CSS was revamped to allow a variety of different head & foot’s and additional CSS able areas.

Not quite an extensive a list that came around from 2.7 to 2.8 however the backend was heavily modified to the point where it’s not even close to the same code. (beware you modders out there).

The results are outstanding!

It was by far one of the easiest site design/creations that i’ve done.  David was *super* receptive on the ideas and art that was needed to get it put together, the guy is a phenom. person, of course I rolled my eyes once or twice at his jokes but hey it was worth it =)

http://www.shortpacked.com

Link Colors

The link color for text links has changed to a blue color and /darker/ of that blue color if someone visited that link.

a { }

is now

a:link { }
a:visited { }

So if you have modified link colors on your site you will need to adjust using the a:link, and a:visited as appropriate.

p.s. don’t forget

a:hover {}

for the mouse over-hover color

the menubar base color css element changed

In a previous revision I have finally fixed the menubar where it doesn’t collapse before showing. Which some people updating to .27 will notice their custom colors have changed, its a simple fix. Every instance of .menubar in your custom css change to .menu

.menubar {}

Is Now

.menu {}

New Footer text Options

Also there are new ‘footer’ text copyright options in the ComicPress Options -> [general tab][footer] area, where you can specify a specific copyright name instead of the site name and a unique / seperate URL for that copyright holder if the author has a seperate personal site other then their comic, if you leave those blank it defaults to the current site.

#subcontent-wrapper

the #subcontent-wrapper area is now available on all layout styles, although on the  layouts it wasnt on previous it will only contain a section like the .narrowcolumn area instead of it and the sidebar.

Latest Thumbnail widget is now just Thumbnail

The latest thumbnail widget is now called Thumbnail where there are now a few more options.
You can now specify the 1st comic in the category you chose as well as even set it to display a random comic from the archive.

If you choose it is written that it will never display the same comic that is currently displayed on the site.

Comic Archive – display as links list

The comic archive if you are displaying per category or by date you can have it display as just the links to those comics instead of comic thumbnails or full posts.

Facebook Like & Meta

There is now a facebook like addition to the addons which adds the facebook like button at the bottom of posts. Additionally there is facebook Meta available so that whatever facebook like plugin (or the one integrated) can find the right information for your comic including the thumbnail for the comic. This is in testing, report if there are any issues.  There is also a widget that can be placed around the comic area and CSS’d / positioned how you would want it.

Dual Posting Blog

The dual posting blog can now be setup to follow the comic properly.   If you disable the comic blog post and enable the appropriate options the dual blog post section where you assign individual columns per posting user (good for artist and writer type situations) it will appropriately follow the date the comic is posted on.

WP-Supercache & ?randomcomic

Fixed the random button in the Comic Navigation widget so that it has nocache=1 as well so that it doesn’t get cached.

CDN (Content Delivery Network)

You can now store your comics on a content delivery network.   How this works is it behaves as normal where you upload your comics per usual, it creates thumbnails yada yada yada and when its time to deliver the comic to the end user, what happens is it will ‘fetch’ the comic from the CDN instead of your own site/host.    Bandwidth saver for larger output sites.

Menubar Social Media buttons

The menubar has a new action area where you can inject social media buttons, read this post here: http://frumph.net/wordpress/how-to-add-social-media-icons-to-the-menubar-w-the-comicpress-and-easel-themes/ on how to utilize it.

Comic Blog Post widget

The comic blog post widget has been revamped to have a couple new options.  The comic blog post widget is so that if  you want your comic’s post to appear inside one of the comic blog posts it can/not to mention any other sidebar on the site.   Greater versatility for site design.

CSS Changes

• Fixed the hovertext CSS for rascal coding so it doesnt look out of place.  Those using rascal will have to see whats going on and change if neccessary.
• Added .facebook-like CSS code to handle the integrated facebook like
• I changed something someplace and forgot to write it down ;/ sooo, yeah sorry.  If anyone finds it tell me.

Note: it was released with a bug for the .facebook-like code, here’s what its supposed to look like:

.facebook_like, .facebook-like {
	display: inline-block;
}

Custom Header

The custom header code has been revamped.   It is no longer a triggered addon but a constant now.   If you use it or not it’s available in the appearance menu.

Comic “Lightbox” support

Comic’s now have lightbox support, this is basically if you have a too large (full page spread) but ComicPress compresses it visually to appear in the provided space, when a user clicks on the comic it will expand out to full size.   The cool thing about his is also the ability to handle multiple comics per day with the lightbox navigation. (enable the jquery multi comic support in the comicpress options for that).

As always report to me if you find any bugs.

- Phil

Syndication/RSS

The RSS section has been rewritten to accommodate adding custom filters to it from child theme’s child-functions.php files, which could include extra info being passed to it.

More Profile Options

I was getting tired of looking at each users profile and seeing outdated social media places, so there are new ones added to the profile that include twitter & facebook. NOTE: Will add those to the author pages for .30

The Archive

The archive.php page which handles things like date tag and comic archives is completely rewritten, in .28 there was a bug with the showing text links that didn’t let you disable them, so it was a good opportunity just to rewrite the thing.

Reference Widget

The reference widget is kinda fun and informative for your readers.  When you “tag” posts, what this widget does is take those tags and finds ‘descriptions’ that you put inside your wp-admin -> posts -> post tags screen for tags, if a description exists, it will display inside the widget that description.

Another thing about the reference widget is you can add ‘images’ .png files to your child-theme’s images directory, just create a directory INSIDE the child themes images directory called “ref”  and put the images there, for example /wp-content/themes/comicpress-mychildtheme/images/ref/    the images are named the same as the ‘slug’ for the tag you created, so if you created a  tag called “Joe Schmoe” as a character name, the slug would be something like joe-schmoe   so the filename the widget looks for is joe-schmoe.png   that file would be located /wp-content/themes/comicpress-mychildtheme/images/ref/joe-schmoe.png  to be found and used.

It’s looking for a 64px width image, with a .png extension in that directory.

New Option for single comic blog posts that are disabled

New option on the home tab to keep comments when the single page’s comic blog post is disabled

Facebook Bugfixes

The CSS for Facebook was messed up a little bit, so fixed it.

I will be writing a new manager at some point in time, but only after I finish Comic Easel.

If anyone wants to take on the daunting task of making a better ComicPress Manager, by all means take it over.   Or to fix the current bugs that are inside of it.  It’s all yours.

ComicPress Manager handles story-lines, dashboard uploading of the comics and creation of the thumbnails and post meta fields in the post editor for hovertext and transcriptions.

It’s UI is confusing, it has issues with checks to make sure that comics do not already exist and the date sometimes gets confused if WordPress’s settings -> general is not set to the server time of where the hosting server is, it also contains duplicate coding of that of the theme itself so it makes ComicPress itself doubly as large memory wise when active.

Don’t get me wrong, it works.  It works for 95% of the people using it.   I just do not have the time to spend on it to revamp it.

- Phil

- Remember EVERY time you upgrade you need to set the blog and comic categories in the comicpress manager or directly editing the comicpress-config.php file.

Important Info for Child Themes

• layout-head.php and layout-foot.php have been modified quite a bit – enough for you to replace them and rework them in your child themes if you have them in your child themes.
• A bunch of new layouts.  Make sure when you upgrade to reset your layout if you need to. NOTE: Go to the comicpress options on the layout page and click ‘save’ again.
• Due to the new layouts, some layout names were changed, check your CSS and put in the new layout name if need to, can see the layout name in the <body class=”layout-<name>”>

CSS Change

#pagewrap-right, #pagewrap-left has changed to #section-wrap

Archive / Search amount to display

This is handled exclusively by the wp-admin – settings – reading now.   If you want to display more or less amount of images / results you would change the value there.

Remove Page Restraint option

The remove the page restraint option has been removed completely, it no longer exists, instead you use CSS with  #page, #page-wide { width: auto;  }

Design elements -foot and -head

The html / dom elements for -foot and -head if you use any CSS that utilizes those, you will need to enable the option on the layout options page.  Otherwise they are now disabled by default.  This increases the page display time by not having theme enabled unless you use them.

New Option

Display first comic on the home page.   This option will make it so  you can set the first comic in the entire series to be the first thing people see when they come to your site.

New Behavior

If you disable the blog on the home page,  allow comments to be displayed on comic posts on home page if comic post is shown.  I.e. comments will display on the home page if you disable the blog loop on the home page.

Internationalization/Localization

Default.mo and default.po files have been updated for sites to be translated into other languages.

ISSUE/DEBUG FAQ

Some people have reported needing to not only set their comic and blog categories but also clicking the ‘reset’ button in the comicpress options to reset their options as well – this is probably due to options array changing with the new options, don’t know but more then likely.