Hi, everyone. stripShow 2.5 is nearing completion, and I thought I’d update you on what I’m working on. These are some new features:
- The Add Comics page is going away. This is a part of my ongoing project to integrate more tightly with WordPress. Now, you can set comic options, upload comics, etc., from the Add Post page that WordPress provides.
- The Bulk Import and Bulk Upload pages have been merged into a kind of file manager, where you can see what you’re importing.
- Now you will be able to specify what characters appear in each comic. This is thanks to WordPress 2.8’s support for custom taxonomies. There will be new template tags and an archive page to support characters. These will behave just like tags, complete with auto-suggestion and clouds.
- I’ve rewritten all the widgets for use with WordPress 2.8 — now they’re all multiwidgets, meaning you can use as many of each one as you’d like on the same page.
- Admin interface enhancements — thumbnails and characters will now appear in the Edit list, and you can specify your characters using the Quick Editor.
- Option to move to next comic by clicking on the comic itself.
- Tighter integration with WordPress’s built-in functions. Now all my custom MySQL queries are gone, and WordPress is used for everything. This makes stripShow compatible with plugins that might modify the WordPress query, like Role Scoper.
- A few edits to stripShow Sandbox — more customization options are moving into the stripShow Sandbox Options page.
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2.5 beta 1 and AutoComic
So I’ve released a beta of 2.5 — don’t install it on a production server, all the usual beta warnings, etc.
One feature that I’m excited about in 2.5, that I didn’t mention in the previous post, is called “AutoComic,” and I thought I’d take a moment to share a little information about it.
One of the most common questions I get on the forums is “Can you make stripShow support the _____ theme?” Well, the answer was always no. Not without editing the theme, anyway, to add stripShow functions (like show_comic()). The plugin can’t really do much about a theme that hasn’t been written for it.
Until now.
Enter AutoComic: Now, with the flick of a switch, stripShow can show a comic and navigation bar on nearly any theme. Thanks to the magic of JavaScript, you don’t even need to edit the theme files. All you need to know is where to put your comic on the page.
Say for instance, I am using the Constructor theme. I’d like to host a webcomic on this site, but don’t know enough about theme editing to get started. stripShow has me covered.
Here’s my site before AutoComic:
As you can see, no comic anywhere. But I can see, in the source, exactly where I want my comic to go — it’s below the header, which is a div element with the id “header.”
So I go to my WordPress admin page, and turn on AutoComic. I tell it to put the comic below the header element, and voila:
Now there’s a comic. Also some navigation arrows. Also, though you can’t tell in this screenshot, a complete widget-aware sidebar. Isn’t that cool?
Obviously, this is intended as a quick, get-up-and-running feature. Nothing beats customizing your themes yourself. But stripShow 2.5 aims to make it all easy. Go download the beta, try it out for yourself!