I just wanted to let you know what’s going on with stripShow at the moment. I know it’s been a while, and 3.0 is way overdue. I’ve been very busy and have not had a lot of time to work on it. However, the project is not dead. 3.0 is almost ready, and as soon as I get a few things (mostly related to various upgrade scenarios people might have) set, I can post a beta.

Thank you for your patience.

Each set is in several different colors to match your design. Check ‘em out! If you wish to use them, they go in wp-content/plugins/stripshow/iconsets.

• Gems Icon Sets (649)
• Plush Icon Sets (589)

2.5.1

I was made aware of an issue which prevented AutoComic from being used on non-English sites. The tooltips that appear when you mouse over the navigation arrows couldn’t use non-Western characters. So that left out, oh, most of the world. Thanks to webdemin, a Greek stripShow user, I was able to modify the code to allow these tooltips to use UTF-8 characters.

2.5.2

Not a bug fix, but a minor new feature. Another user requested the ability to, in AutoComic, choose whether to place the navigation buttons above or below the comic (or both). I have added this feature.

Meanwhile, stripShow keeps motoring towards 3.0, which will mark a major change. WordPress 3′s support for custom post types means that comics no longer need to be blog posts in a special category, they can be their own unique thing. This is admittedly an obvious idea, and I know that ComicPress 3 will do the same thing. Some features just slap you in the face. I’m also working in features to make AutoComic more flexible.

In the meantime, speaking of AutoComic, I’m always looking for new arrow sets. The ones that ship with stripShow (you can find them in your iconsets/ folder) were made by me, and if there’s one thing I’m not, it’s a designer. If anyone has created a set of icons for AutoComic, please feel free to let me know!

Right now I’m working on getting all the stuff that’s in the manual up on the wiki. From there, I’ll start adding new explanations and how-tos.

The address of the wiki is stripshow.wikia.com.

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!

• 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.

So I downloaded a copy of WordPress MU, and installed stripShow on it, wondering what kinds of changes I’ll have to make to the latest (development) version of stripShow to get it to work… I’d laid out a block of time to explore and figure things out. Much to my surprise…

… it works fine.

I’m still exploring, but from where I’m sitting, there have yet to be any issues. I’m very impressed with the transparency that WordPress MU seems to afford. It works just like WordPress, but keeps your blogs and the settings for them separate. No changes to my code seem to be necessary. I’ve got a test site up with multiple comic blogs and they all seem to work OK.

More on this as testing continues.