Before you go screaming bloody murder. ^ As you see in the featured image of this post, my new project is called Comic Easel.
Highlights of Comic Easel & Easel:
- Comic Easel is a Plugin, that injects your comic into *any* WordPress theme.
- The Easel theme uses the base ComicPress CSS so your old child-themes will still be compatible.
- There is *NO* configuration of setting up Comic Easel, you install the plugin and can upload a comic right away.
- Everything is setup to be highly intuitive to adding comics and your comic posts.
- Unlimited comics per day, per chapter. Add a comic anytime you want.
- Additional plugins and addons work with Comic Easel – Portfolio Easel, Art Easel, Design Easel, Game Easel, Podcast Easel, Showcase.
- Quite a bit of ComicPress 2.9.2.* is integrated into Comic Easel, however it is streamlined to be faster, easier to deal with and less confusing to the end user.
- What about multilingual support? Yes, Comic Easel has that, you can upload a comic per-language, and on determination of the users browser language setting it will output the comic of choice.
Okay so whats with the name change? The name change is basically because Comic Easel is *not* a direct upgrade of ComicPress. It’s a whole new product that advances far beyond what ComicPress is currently capable of.
What about ComicPress 2.9.2.* ? I’m still updating the 2.9.2.* series of ComicPress to make sure all of it’s users still have a site that is up to date with WordPress with bug fixes, etc.
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As you can see in this graphic, Comic Easel is it’s *own* area, everything is integrated into a central location. Any addon’s that you might get like the cast or location addons auto-integrate directly into the dashboard areas., you don’t have to do anything special besides add the addon itself.
Uploading a comic is pretty much how it was done previously with ComicPress, you upload a comic and it creates a post with your options. However, as said the comics are now attached to the post itself and not read via the directory by date, which means unlimited comics per day, per whatever chapter/book/story you assign it to.
The *key* to Comic Easel is ease of use. I’ve been developing Comic Easel so that its very simple and end-users will not have the headaches involved with understanding what to do to add their comic to their website.
Discussion (30) ¬
Hooray! It’ll be a Christmas Pressent! It sounds wonderful – love the features.
Comic Easel sounds cool. I recently upgraded my site to use the latest ComicPress, and I love some of its newer features (like displaying the comics archives as a wall of thumbnails). However, I’m always interested in learning new tools. Thank you for creating this. :^D
Coolness.I’m definitely getting this when it comes out.You sir are a genius and a saint.
Oh wow this looks so fantastic! I just had to tell you guys how utterly fantastic you are for this! Is it going to be paid, like CP3 was supposed to be? Just curious as I’ll need to start saving up now. XD
What about previous comic posts made through comic-press? Will there be a bulk upload? Or an importer? I’d hate to have to load every bloody comic again, and risk losing the few comments I’ve garnered.
Also, will Comic-Press be continued by the rest of the team? I know that I’ve dealt mainly with you in the past (and will gladly continue to :p), but I’m just curious as to the fate of the CP in general.
1) This isn’t ComicPress, it’s not a straight upgrade, hence the name change. That being said, it’s quite easy to make an upgrade script that will change comic posts from ComicPress into Comic posts for Comic Easel and will be available for those who want to upgrade.
2) Yes on importer. It will go through all images in the image manager and find ones without post attachements and then create posts for them and you select the date and time you want it to be on, etc.
3 & 4) I answered this on page 2.
I was currently in the process of setting up comicpress for myself. You seem to think that this will be far superior, so should I just wait for this to come out (and keep using my old static page setup in the meantime)?
I’m a total total beginner so setting everything up the way I like it is likely to take a lot of time (you did an amazing job at making everything easy and user-friendly, that’s not the problem, I’m just slow with these things).
Most of that ‘setting up’ time will probably be spent customizing the wp theme though, so I suppose I get to keep all that even if I switch to comic easel later?
I would continue to use ComicPress, there’s really no telling whats going to happen with Comic Easel just yet, but I do know that i’m going to make an upgrade path from ComicPress to Comic Easel
all right,
thanks a lot!
I’ve been playing with Easel for 2 days now and I’m more impressed than I ever thought I would be (I knew I would be!)…and I love ComicPress.
The only thing I’d like to see in Easel is the Moods for the posts like ComicPress. Other than that, I’m using Easel for my next webcomic! =)
That’s the best news I could have hoped for. The kinds of things Comic Press DOES are really active, and for me that’s the difference between a plugin (does stuff) and a theme (mainly presentational, if it “does” anything at all it should be clientside stuff related to presentation). Comic Press, much as I love it, was way overstepping what a theme should do. I look forward to getting the plugin, and I’m sure you’ll have a lot of folks migrating from CP2.9.2 to the plugin, as I will be.
Wow, I go away for a little bit and look what happens….
so I just got Comic Easel and Easel theme off the git repo and installed them just on a testing site. RU sayin’ there is no “special” thing any more to post a comic, you just upload it to ur grcs lib and link to it as part of a regular blog post? Can I help w/ documentation?
Sure you can help with documentation, to answer your question though; the code isn’t properly in yet but you will be uploading a comic still; but it gets attached right away.
Still deciding on whether or not you upload it direct in the post or use an outside uploader.
Unlimited comics per day? Thank god! That was my biggest problem with Comicpress. Looking forward to this, along with the Art and Podcast easels. Big Commpress fan. 😉
I’m also curious about Art Easel and Portfolio Easel, but I could not find any info other than their names on your site. Are you working on those alongside comic easel or do you plan to release them later?
By the way, you said that there will be other addons for a cost on the website. Is Podcast Easel one of them, or is it free?
Depends how much work I put into it, if its just a movement of CommPress to Media Easel then no, it will be free, if I put a ton of work into it then yeah i’ll be requesting a donation.
Any idea when some documentation might be available? I tried it and for some reason comic pages cover the whole website layout. Should display above, I believe?
comic easel ? .. it’s not even remotely ready yet to even be tried …
In that case have a good time working on it, I guess?
Is the folder for comic pages going to support subfolders? Just thinking how chaotic this thing becomes after several years of daily updates.
I still haven’t done much with the beta, cos I really can’t find much about it. Do you have a group or something? Comments on a blog post is really not ideal vehicle for collaboration.
There is not a beta available for Comic Easel yet, that’s why you havent read anything on it.
i want to put up my 2 webcomics online in the near future. Can u give me any heads up on what i should do. I read that comicpress 3.0 is no longer under development. so please can u give me some timeline for comic easel??? from what i have heard comic press is the best there is and thats why im abstaining from using stripshow or webcomic. please do let me know about the tentative release of comic easel.. in your post it was dec 18.
ComicPress 3.0 (as it were) is not being developed, however the 2.9.2.* series is still going strong with updates. Comic Easel is still in production and will be awhile, wordpress continues to develope post types so the new wordpress version is coming up with 3.1 which changes a few things so we decided to wait (amongst other reasons).
So, 4 months later… Whats the latest on Comic Easel? I see the Beta for Easel 2.0.7 is posted but I’m still interested in the Comic Easel plugin.
Comic Easel plugin is actually done, I just need to do the documentation. Told everyone I will not release until all the documentation is done and I am going to stick by that. Frumph.net uses Comic Easel the plugin.
Sweet! Looking forward to it!
I’m notoriously lazy at creating documentation, just a heads up;/