Announcing the final release of version 1.5 of stripShow, my WordPress plugin for automation of webcomics.

If you create a webcomic, and you don’t use WordPress, it’s time to get with the 21st century. Blogging software and webcomics are a natural match. Wordpress provides automatic features like RSS, notification of search engines, and easy content management… stripShow takes those features further, adding:

• Conventional comic-navigation links (first comic, previous comic, next comic, latest comic, random comic)
• RSS feeds with the comic image included
• Searchable transcripts that can be added right in the blog, viewed or hidden at the webmaster’s or reader’s option
• A simple and easily-customizable example theme
• A full-featured nested storyline system, including the usual storyline dropdown menu, but also with an easy-to-use management page
• Bulk import of existing comics into WordPress’s blog database
• Support for GIF, JPEG, PNG, and even HTML and Flash files as comics
• Flexibility in where to store your comic files and how to name them, all controlled by a standard WordPress-style admin page
• Of course, since it’s a blog, each comic has its own “rant box” to go with it. Also, you can maintain a conventional blog on the same site, separate from your comic

stripShow is in heavy development, and I’m constantly getting new ideas from people on our forum. New features are constantly being added.

Check out the new version of stripShow, 1.5, at our downloads page, or see it in action at our example site. I think you’ll like it!

I’m pleased to announce the release of the first Release Candidate for stripShow 1.5!

There are a lot of bug fixes in this release, basically anything that’s been discussed in the stripShow forum. In addition, new features include the ability to add searchable transcripts to your comics, and the code has been updated to work with WordPress 2.3!

StripShow 1.5RC1 is available for download here.

This is still a Release Candidate, so caution should be taken… if there are no reports of bugs, this will be the final version which should come out in a few days.

If you have any problems at all, whether it’s an error message or simply problems parsing my horrible documentation, please post a note on the forum so I can know.

If you’re considering upgrading to WordPress 2.3, and you use stripShow, DO NOT DO IT! Apparently, they’ve done away with one of the database tables that stripShow (like a lot of other plugins, apparently) uses. Until I find a way around this, stripShow will NOT work with WordPress 2.3. Please don’t upgrade!

UPDATE: stripShow 1.5 and later are compatible with WordPress 2.3.