Let’s start out at the top.  The “All in One SEO Pack” plugin that’s available on the wordpress site is decent and will help you generate meta tags for your site.   Something to look into.

References:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Meta tags have NOT been depreciated for use on search engines to describe your listings since major search engines started using a third party database for site listings according to popular rumour.

References:

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006780.html

XML Sitemaps are used by Google to help get a proper indexing of your site.   A decent plugin for WordPress for Google XML Site Maps is available on the wordpress site as well.

References:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

According to Google’s main blog sites and for the life of me I can’t refind this information to link to it so if anyone finds the information tell me.   Is that having your ‘permalink’ structure set to /?p=##   to a Query String and/or the /date/date/date – i.e. /2009/01/12/postname/   is the – BAD – .. and I agree.

I can understand why search engines skip the query string permalink structure, the /?p=## style for the reason that it can’t directly use that information to attribute to specific database linking to content with words that can denote it’s information.  … which also comes the point of why using the /date/date/date/postname structure is also bad.     .. The way that the search engines generate link-information to references will make those particular stand out bad and usually get avoided.

The method that they proposed in the article I read is to use the permalink stucture where it can use the information in it to more coherantly to linking to it:  /%category%/%postname%/ That way the search engines will using the reference of %category% and reference of the %postname% in a more valuable way for the content inside the post.

More References and additional tips:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

1st we’re going to add some code to the functions.php to recognize that we have a widget in the wp-admin console options for widgets.

In your comicpress theme’s function.php file, find this line: (dependent on which theme)

if  ( function_exists('register_sidebar' ) )
register_sidebar( array('name'=>'Left Sidebar' ));
register_sidebar( array('name'=>'Right Sidebar' ));

And lets add one

register_sidebar( array('name'=>'FooterWidget'));

however I want to clean this code up so make it look like this:

if  ( function_exists('register_sidebar' ) ) {
register_sidebar( array('name'=>'Left Sidebar' ));
register_sidebar( array('name'=>'Right Sidebar' ));
register_sidebar( array('name'=>'FooterWidget' ));
}

What this says is “if you can register a sidebar, register these sidebar’s to be seen in the wp-admin/widgets menu and store the information of what’s in them in the database.

Next we’re going to edit the footer.php file, right under the <div id=”footer”> we’re going to make wordpress see the widget.

<div id="footer">
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('FooterWidget') ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>

What this says is if there’s no dynamic sidebar available and no sidebar in the database named FooterWidget then do whats inside the area between the code, else display the widgets that have been assigned to FooterWidget

That’s all there to it, the width of the area is already defined in the #footer CSS, the best use of this widget would be a text-box widget where you can place some sort of advertisement.  You can also do something like this for the header or even above the header for more advertisements instead of hard coding different ads all the time you just edit the widget information.

- Phil

One is: http://yoast.com/custom-wordpress-database-error-pages/

What does this mean for ComicPress users?  Well it means several things by reading that particular post.   It means that when you are Digg’d or any other thing that might have consequences on your website and your site goes down; you’re stuck not knowing it’s down until someone notifies you or you happen to look.   Which means your missing out on a huge majority of possible readers.

This article mentions that it’s not sending out the proper header identification of a 500 error in the normal error code, however since this article was released the code change was made in current releases of WordPress to properly send that 500 error out.

The actual function in the core WordPress is in the wp-includes/functions.php file in the function  dead_db()

As everyone says though, its very unwise to make edits to core files so modifying or creating a db-error.php file and placing it into the /wp-content/ directory is a very valid solution.   It will let you create a custom page in the look and feel that your normal site has. (without using any normal wp calls), straight html.

I’ve made a mock up using directions based on the article above and placed it in this file for you to download, rename to .php, edit it and place it into your /wp-content/ directory.

<?php
// Custom DB-Error.PHP by Joost De Valk (Additions by Philip M. Hofer(Frumph))
// Credits: Joost de Valk  - http://yoast.com/custom-wordpress-database-error-pages/
// If it's a 500 error, send the header for a 500 error.
// this only works if your email server doesn't require authentication to send mail.
// If you have SMTP authentication there is a workaround but requires some modifications if someone wants to
// work on code to do it.
// info here: http://email.about.com/od/emailprogrammingtips/qt/et073006.htm using Pear
header("HTTP/1.0 500 Internal Server Error");

/*
*	Uncomment this area to allow emails sent to you when this happens ^^ read above
*	replace my name with yours, my email with your email
*/
/* Remove this line if you want to be mailed.
 $mailto 	= "Your Name";
 $mailfrom 	= "youremail@yourdomain.com";

 if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] != "/wp-content/db-error.php") {
	$headers 	= "From: ".$mailfrom."rn".
		"Reply-To: Your Namern".
		"X-Mailer: PHP/".phpversion()."rn".
		"X-Priority: 1 (High)";
	$message	= "Go fix it!nn".
		"It broke when someone tried to open this page:

http://".$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']."nn".

		"Best,n".
		"Your WordPress installation";
	$subject	= "DB error at ".$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];
	mail($mailto,$subject,$message,$headers);
}
Remove this line if you want to be mailed. */

// EDIT HOW YOU WANT IT TO BE VISUALLY SEEN BELOW
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
	<title>Yet Another Database Error!</title>

</head>
<body>
	<center>
	<h1>Error establishing a database connection</h1>
	</center>
</body>
</html>

- Phil

In your header.php file find:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />

And place this under it:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> Atom Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />

After spending 1/2 hour debugging the one for comicpress advanced I found a good set of code that is working like I want it. *so far*

header.php:

<title><?php echo bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if (is_home () ) { echo " - "; bloginfo('description');
} elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) { echo " - "; single_post_title();
} elseif (is_search() ) { echo " - "; echo " search results: "; echo wp_specialchars($s);
} else { echo " - "; wp_title('',true); }?></title>

Try to avoid using extended ascii in *any* SEO attempts when creating titles for your site, post and pages.

- Phil

To secure the /comics/  /comics-rss/ and /comics-archive/ directories the *easiest* method is to just through an index.php file inside each of those directories with this content:

<?php
header('Location: /');
?>

That will make it just redirect straight up to the root directory.

However, if you want to be fancy about it, creating a .htaccess file for that directory and following the guidelines http://wiki.dreamhost.com/KB_/_Unix_/_.htaccess_files#Disable_Directory_Listings might be worth some time to invest in learning how to do.

Disable Directory Listings

Occasionally, you may not have a default index document in a directory. If a default document is not found, whenever a visitor types in the directory name in their browser, a full listing of all the files in that directory will be displayed. This could be a security risk for your site. To prevent without having to add a default index document to every folder, you can enter the following line in your .htaccess file to disable a directory’s contents from being shown:

Options -Indexes

However, here’s an even more advanced method of securing your directory AND not allow *ANYONE* to hotlink to your images. This way noone can go and use your bandwidth and not having them on your page itself and putting an image in it’s place saying “You cannot hotlink to this image.” Create a .htaccess file and put these contents to it in the directory you want to secure from hotlinking.

Options -Indexes
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?domain.tld/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/path_to/nohotlinking.jpg [NC]
RewriteRule .(gif|jpg)$ http://www.domain.tld/path_to/nohotlinking.jpg [R,L]

Change domain.tld to your webcomics domain and extension, like pcweenies.com
Change www.domain.tld/path_to/nohotlinking.jpg to a the path to an image on your site saying not to hotlink the images.

However, I suggest the easy method because, really .. that’s all you need to do.

- Phil

It turns out wp_list_pages keeps track of what page you’re currently on when dynamically creating the menubar items and adds an extra CSS styling class to it called ” current_page_item ” ..

Now what’s cool about that is the fact that now that we know there’s a specific class element for what the current page is we can use it to change the visual behavior of the menubar!

#menu current_page_item a, #menu li.current_page_item a {
    background:#fff;
    font-weight:bold;
    color: #000;
}

In the style.css place that line just below the CSS element set: #menu li:hover, #menu li.sfhover

And it will (whatever you set the colorations to) be active for whatever page your currently on.  Of course you will need to have to tweak it a little, for example if you have subpages it’s best not to use the background: element else it bleeds down (unless you re-affix the other CSS to re-establish the background: element itself).

Like for example to stop the bleeding reattribute the background: code to the sub menu CSS in various places, here’s one:

#menu li li a {
    background: #000;
}

- Phil (Frumph)

(if you’re using pretty permalinks)

for example, johnn saturn’s normal feed is:  http://johnnysaturn.com/feed/ – that will display the comics, the blogs and everything it can in one big open feed.

However if you want to see *just* his comic feed it would be: http://johnnysaturn.com/category/comics/feed/

That will display the feed for *just* the comics category.  Give it a try on your site, like:  http:// yoursite.com / category / <comicscategoryname> / feed /

My feed for Anomaly comic : http://anomaly.frumph.net/category/webcomic/feed/

I use the “webcomic” category for the comics so ^ putting that in will show just the category webcomic feed.

This works best with pretty permalinks btw.   Best permalink setting is /%category%/%postname%/  if you don’t have that as the permalink then change it, cause google and yahoo and other engines *hate* the permalinks that look like dates.

- Phil

Well this is how it works, the wp_list_pages() function generates the links  that are shown in your menubar, with a side-effect of adding CSS class statements.

If you view’ your source code (view-source) while looking at your site you will see the ‘end result’ output of your website you can see what classes are created for each menu item.

For example, here at frumph.net if you view the source, by right-clicking the screen then choosing view-source you will see that the “archive” link shows that there is

<li class="page-item page-item-3">

.. that class page-item-3 is specific and individual for that archive link.

If I wanted to hide the archive link from being viewed in the menubar I just need to do a little CSS.

.page-item-3 {
     display:none;
}

Creating a class in your stylesheet of the name you found for that menu item will let you do what you want with it. Adding display:none; to the class in the css will make it ‘not visible’ to be seen in a browser.

- Phil

[ css ]
The location of your .CSS files (not your original, don’t touch original) the files in this directory are edited by using the Dashboard -> Appearance -> Comicpress CSS panel.

[functions]
The locatons of various functions needed to run ComicPress.  They are included() in the functions.php file.

[images]
ComicPress 2.8 has some images? wierd huh? This area has images for the graphic comic navigation, some example images for backgrounds and more.

<strong>[/js]
A directory seperating the javascript that is used on ComicPress 2.8

[swfobject]
^^ What the heck? swf ? Yes, in 2.8 you can upload using comicpress manager a .swf  comic and it will display it. .. heres the kicker, the way to make sure the height and width of your .swf displays correctly you need to make ‘custom fields.  Edit your post you just made and create 2 “Custom Fields” .. first one name:   fheight  with the height of your swf, and the next one is   fwidth   with the width of your flash image. (more on this later). Warning: Comicpress 2.8 does *not* create thumbnails of flash files.  This directory contains the necessary files to allow this to occure.

[widgets]
ComicPress 2.8 is WordPress 2.8+ only.  The widgets used in comicpress have been re-written in the new WordPress 2.8+ style. THis directory contains those widgets and called from the functions.php

style.css
This is the original style.css file, this is your original “how your site looks file” .. you should *NOT*, I repeat *NOT* edit this original file.   The Comicpress CSS panel is what you should be using from now on.

404.php
When WordPress cannot find where to locate a particular url on your site it will display this.

archive.php
This is used when you click on a tag or category.  It displays the various different lists of the subject tag or category you chose.

archive-comic.php
Template File:  You can associate this template to a page you create.  It shows your COMICS, by year going down the page, showing the year and date of the comic then link to the comic.

archive-post-calendar.php
Template File: You can associate this template to a page you create.  It shows a calendar for the year with clickable links to previous years of your posts (not comics).

archive-comic-calendar.php
Template File: You can associate this template to a page you create.  It shows a calendar for the year with clickable links to previous years of your comics (not blog posts).

archive-comic-storyline.php
Template File: You can associate this template to a page you create.  This template shows a storyline structured list of the storyline you created using ComicPress Manager.

archive-comic-storyline-thumbs.php
Template File: You can associate this template to a page you create.  This template shows a the same storyline structured list you created using ComicPress Manager but also thumbnail images as well.

archive-comic-year.php
Template File: You can associate this template to a page you create.  This just just like archive-comic.php but instead of going down the entire page it splits it up by year, you click on the year you want to view and it will only show that particular year.

archives.php
Template File: You can associate this template to a page you create.  This shows an archive view of all the posts you have done on your site.

buystrip.php
Template File: You can associate this template to a page you create.  When you associate this to one of your pages and edit the options in Dashboard -> Appearance -> ComicPress Options [ paypal info ]  you can use the accompanying buy print button widget and whatever comic your currently on when you click the buy print button will go to this page with the proper information for a reader to buy a print of your comic.  You need to setup a paypal account that can handle credit cards.  When you get a receipt in your mail of a purchase head to kinko’s make a print, sign it, make it all pretty and mail it off with a nice thank you card.

comicpress-config.php
This file stores the static information for your ComicPress installation, the comic category, what size to do thumbnails when comicpress manager creates them, the directories where your comics and thumbs are stored, etc.

comicpress-options.php
This is the Dashboard -> Appearance -> Comicpress Options panel file of functions.

comicpress-options-config.php
This file holds the information for the options for comicpress-options.php and what name they’re store in in your database.

comments.php
This file is called when someone wants to read or respond to comments.  It’s how they are displayed.

comicpress-options-css.php
ComicPress CSS is the editor for what you use now to edit your Look & Feel of your site.  Do *not* edit the style.css anymore.  Find what you want to edit in the style.css and copy only that element into one of the various different files you can edit in here.  There’s the “custom” which get sent to every browser, this  is the one you will most often use.  Again, only put the elements you want to change here.  If you want to change the background to the site you *only* need to override the background element in body,  body { background: #000 }  .. everything else will be inherited from the original style.css .  There are also browser dependant css files you can edit, for elements that only work on certain browsers as well as a css file that is *only* used when you are *not* on a comic page.  If you want to avoid using the individual browser’s CSS and want to output to all browsers except IE there’s a Not IE CSS file you can use.

footer.php
This file is called at the end of the visible page you see and usually shows who made what, when.

functions.php
This file contains all the code to read the widgets and functions of the site, also contains the core ComicPress code.

header.php
This is called at the top of the visible Page, it contains the “header” div as well as menubar.

image.php
This file is called when you’re viewing a graphic file with the media viewer.

index.php
This is the *main* file that is displayed visually after the header.php and before the footer.php as the first page that everyone see’s when going to your site.

links.php
Template File: You can associate this template to a page you create.  This lists off all the links and
categorized links you create with wordpress.

page.php
For every *page* you create, like the about page and others that are not associated with a template this file is called.

search.php
When you do a search, this file is called up to list the search you asked for.

searchform.php
This is called by wordpress and contains a form input box to type in what you want to search for on your site.

searchform-transcript.php
This is called by the search transcript widget and is a form input box you can type in to search transcripts.

search-transcript.php
This is function code which is used to figure out how to search transcripts.

sidebar-above.php
sidebar-blog.php
sidebar-comicleft.php
sidebar-comicright.php
sidebar-footer.php
sidebar-header.php
sidebar-left.php
sidebar-over.php
sidebar-right.php
sidebar-under.php
sidebar-underblog.php
Sidebar Files, these files are loaded up by the various portions of your site in pre-determined areas. They
Allow you to put widgets inside them.

single.php
This file is loaded as the page which is seen when you go through the various posts and comics you have.  It is loaded when someone goes through your archive of comics or reads previous blog posts, this also has where a user can read and post comments to each individual comic or blog post.

screenshot.png
This is the image that is displayed when someone goes to the theme’s in your dashboard to pick which theme you want to use.

wpmu-functions.php
The WPMU functions file for integrating with wordpress MU.

Next part, the [ Features ] a list of all the features of ComicPress 2.8