Version 2.5 features AutoComic, allowing webcomics creators to use virtually any WordPress theme, not just themes designed specifically for webcomics. Thanks to the magic of JavaScript, you can mix comics with your regular blog and still take advantage of stripShow’s features such as searchable transcripts and storylines.

Also new in 2.5 is a handy interface to add comics directly from WordPress’s Add Post page. No longer do comics have to be added from a separate page.

The default stripShow template theme, stripShow Sandbox, has gotten a bit of a facelift as well, but don’t worry. These changes are confined to a separate file, so they won’t affect existing child themes that don’t import that file.

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!

New features in 2.1 include:

• COVER YOUR SHAME! If you happen to draw a comic that is sometimes just nasty, filthy, disgusting… well, we don’t judge. But sometimes people shouldn’t be browsing that sort of thing from work, and for the benefit of those readers, creators can now cover NSFW strips with a cover image that must be clicked on before the real comic is displayed.
• CUSTOMIZE YOUR THUMBNAILS! Now, if you’d rather thumbnail images were something a little more personalized than just a scaled-down version of the comic, you can stick alternate images in a subfolder of your comics folder and show those instead.
• SE HABLA FRANCAIS, MEIN FREUND! stripShow is now fully internationalized, and ready to be translated into all the languages of our big blue planet!

Obviously, all the great features that made stripShow the finest solution for WordPress webcomics, such as searchable, formatted transcripts, nested, low-maintenance storylines,  easy upload of comics, and an awesome theming template, are still present, and ready to propel your webcomic into the 2010s.

Download stripShow today from the WordPress Plugin Directory today, or visit our support site and join our community!

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

If you had an old forum account, and you ever posted, you have an account here on this blog now. However, you don’t have a password. So what you need to do is hit “Login” (either on the sidebar, or on the forum page) and it will take you to the login page. Hit “Forgot password” and it will send you an email with a link — follow that link, and you’ll get a second email with a temporary password. Use that password to log in, then change it in the Profile page.

Since I did this conversion myself, I expect some things may be a bit wonky. Let me know if you have any issues. Private Messaging works, or if not, email bhawkins AT monkeylaw DOT org.

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

• Your name
• Your comic’s name
• Your comic’s URL
• A brief description of what your comic is about
• A sample strip; put your best foot forward!
• A 128×128 icon representing your comic. This is optional, but if you don’t provide one, I’ll make one, and I suck.

Eventually, I will have some kind of form to upload this stuff, but in the meantime, you can shoot an email to bhawkins AT monkeylaw DOT org, and I’ll be happy to add you to the gallery.

Overview

stripShow 2.0 includes a WordPress plugin providing easy-to-use administration pages for the uploading or importing of comics, and an all-new theme framework for creating your own stripShow themes.

stripShow operates by associating comic files (usually graphic images) with blog posts. Comic posts are kept separate from regular blog posts, which can continue to be used as normal.

stripShow is not just a theme — it’s a complete, all-in-one webcomics solution. Included with stripShow is the powerful new theming package, stripShow Sandbox, which provides a basic theme for webcomics display. You can easily create child themes which can customize the look of your site. Elements of stripShow Sandbox can be removed or customized to your liking in your child themes without ever modifying the parent theme. Never worry about theme upgrades destroying your work again!

Features

Features of stripShow include:

• Support for GIF, JPG, PNG, HTML, and Flash files as comics.
• Comic files can be given any name you like.
• Multiple comic files can be associated with a single blog post.
• Comics can be grouped into storylines, which can be nested within other storylines.
• Comics may be included in the RSS feed for your blog.
• Metadata can be included within each comic for alternate “tool tip” text or to specify the orientation (horizontal or vertical) of the comic.
• Text transcripts of each comic can be added to the comic post, using a handy tag language. These transcripts are searchable by WordPress and outside search engines.
• A robust theming framework, stripShow Sandbox, which provides a basic theme for webcomics display.
• stripShow includes several comics-specific widgets to plug into your site. In addition, the stripShow Sandbox framework includes two new widgetable areas, in the site header and for comics themselves
• Handy template tags for adding stripShow functionality to existing themes.

Where to get stripShow

stripShow is a part of the WordPress Plugin Directory, which means it can be automatically downloaded from within WordPress, or it can be downloaded directly from here.

Documentation

Full documentation for stripShow is available from the stripShow Support Site:

• HTML format
• PDF format

http://stripshow.monkeylaw.org/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=stripshow-2.0b2.zip

Notable differences:

• The colorful playful theme that used to be the stripShow Sandbox is now a child theme called ComicalStrip, and the stripShow Sandbox is kind of generic. I figured that would make it a little more universal.
• An additional child theme, Golden, is also included
• I've added lots of action hooks to the template, so you can add and remove functionality without altering the parent theme. Golden is an example of this — I've stuck previous and next arrows to the sides of the comic, like Diesel Sweeties has.

As always, I'm desperately seeking feedback on this version. If there are no bugs, I think this might just be 2.0.

stripShow is the WordPress plugin that transforms your blog into a full-featured webcomics platform. All the original features of stripShow, such as built-in searchable transcripts and hierarchical storyline support, are of course still present.

New features in 2.0:

• A handy WordPress admin interface for uploading comics — either singly, or in bulk.
• Now you can name your comic files whatever you want — no need to have a date in the filename.
• 7 new template tags
• 3 sidebar widgets
• New theme framework based on Sandbox — create a child theme and leave the framework alone, to make upgrading a snap
• Obscuring of comic filenames now available, so you can show comics without letting people know where you keep them.
• Graphic novel creators can configure their archives to start at the first page rather than the last

That’s just what I was able to remember off the top of my head.

stripShow 2.0b1 is available here. Because this is a beta, it will not appear in the WordPress Plugin Directory until it is formally released.

I look forward to hearing feedback. What doesn’t work? What’s not clear? What could be better? Feel free to contact me at the stripShow Support Forum

Have fun, and Happy Stripping!

• Fixed bug where initialization of storylines may take a while if timezone is not set under PHP 5.
• Rewrote transcript code to be more tolerant of whitespace. In addition, equals sign is no longer required for non-character transcript tags.

If your transcripts were all messed up because of whitespace, this is the fix.

As always, the latest version of stripShow is available from the Download page.

• Improved XHTML 1.0 Strict compatiblity
• Fixed bug where comment link was not shown on index page
• Fixed bug where same blog entries were shown on every page when linked from index page
• Current comic now has alt text encoded as HTML entities for validation
• Overhauled storyline code to only do one MySQL query and to speed up operations. Previously, things got seriously bogged down the more stories and strips you had in your archive.

The main new feature is a set of additional parameters to the navigation links — now there is a second parameter, called always — normally, links won’t show if it’s not appropriate — for instance, there is usually no reason to have a “previous comic” link if you’re viewing the first comic. The always parameter, if set to TRUE, will show the link regardless. It will merely take you to the page you’re already looking at. The last_comic tag also has a new parameter to give a link to an absolute URL instead of the index page.

Also, navigation links now accept a parameter to show a tooltip (by way of the <img> tag’s TITLE attribute) when the comic is moused over. 

And that’s pretty much it. This plugin has been tested and seems to work well with WordPress 2.5.1, and actually appears to be pretty compatible with ComicPress 2.5-based themes as well.  

The next release (barring unforseen bug fixes) of stripShow will be version 2.0 and will include major overhaul to the theme… expect a complete modernization of the theme, with copious comments to aid in customization. No more table-based navigation bars. Complete WordPress widgetization.  Built-in links for social bookmarking sites. Etc. No ETA yet on 2.0, it’ll be done when it’s done.  

As always, you can download the new version of stripShow from the Downloads page, and always, I’m always interested in hearing about your stripShow experience in the forum.