• 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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This is the logo of Facebook, in case you haven't seen it before.

At the request of a user, I’ve been exploring ways to integrate stripShow with Facebook. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I think the best thing to do would be to see if I can integrate sS with one of the existing WP plugins that allows Facebook posting. I’m testing WordBook now.

How might this affect webcomics creators? Well, let’s say you want to sell memberships on your site — only members who pay you money get to see certain strips. Take Joyce & Walky for example — the general public gets to see only the Saturday strips, whereas paying members get strips all week.

ComicPress has some support for this idea — you can tag a user as a Member and add content in your blog posts that only members can see. My idea was to see what plugins already exist that can manage user roles, and RoleScoper seems to be the best.

Think about a situation beyond just paid/unpaid. Say you want to sell three levels of service — silver, gold, and platinum for example. Silver members get to see some strips, gold members get to see even more, and platinum members get to see ultra-special exclusive strips. OK, so maybe most webcomics creators don’t get that deeply into the marketing, but it would be nice to be able to do.

So I’m rewriting some of stripShow’s code to be more compatible with RoleScoper and other plugins. Version 2.5 will have full compatibility.