Welcome!

Publishing comics with WordPress is a unique endeavor and will take just a little preparation. It's suggested that you read this document in its entirety before attempting to publish comics with ComicPress and WordPress. You may save yourself a headache and a trip to the support forum, however, if you do run into problems, you are always welcome there. Enjoy the theme!

— Tyler Martin

Step 1. Install

We are assuming you have already downloaded and installed WordPress. You will need to be running the latest version 2.8.4 or higher. If not, go download it at WordPress.org and follow these instructions. You may find that your host provideds a one-click install for WordPress.

Download and install the ComicPress Manager plugin and you will be able to skip this step and head to Step 2. You can install it from WordPress Administration (http://yoursite.com/wp-admin) by heading to Plugins|Add New and search the term "ComicPress". It still might be beneficial to read over this step to understand what's going on a bit more.

The theme needs to go in your WordPress themes folder... /wp-content/themes/. Then go to WordPress Administration panel and select Appearance|Themes. Finally, select the ComicPress 2.8 theme. After the theme has been selected go to the Dashboard -> Appearance -> ComicPress Options and select the style and options you want to use and save.

ComicPress is a single theme with 5 separate styles (layouts) each with their own way to present your comic. They are mostly identical other than a few layout differences to best fit your comic or give you a bit of a head start in customizing the theme the way you want.

  1. Standard Edition [ comicress ]: This is the default layout, it allows for a comic up to 780px wide (without modifying) and provides a blog area and single sidebar under it. Perfect for a medium sized comic strip or a full page comic if you don't want a sidebar along the side of it. Fits within a 800px wide screen.
  2. 3-Column Edition [ comicress-3c ]: This layout is a bit wider (just fitting within a 1024px wide screen) and allows for a comic up to 980px wide. Underneath it is a center blog area with sidebars to the left and right of it. This will fit a bigger comic strip, might be a bit too big for a full page comic, and give you more sidebar room for additional items.
  3. Vertical Edition [ comicress-v ]: This layout is ideal for a comic strip with stacked panels (2x2 rather 4 wide), or even a single panel comic that is up to 550px wide. The comic sites above the blog area, and the sidebar runs down the side of both the comic and blog.
  4. Vertical 3-Column Edition [ comicress-v3c ]: This ads a third column to the Vertical Edition, on the left. So the comic and blog will be sandwiched between two sidebars.
  5. Graphic Novel Edition [ comicress-gn ]: This layout is back to the Standard Edition's 780px wide comic with a blog and sidebar under it, but this edition has a second sidebar on the left running beside the blog AND the comic. It's called the Graphic Novel Edition as it could be useful for full page comics, allowing a sidebar to run alongside the comic so that you can get more items/ads above the scroll. It is also ideal for a 760px wide comic strip that could use an extra sidebar without going to the wide comic format of the 3-Column Edition.

You can choose any of the different styles after you install the theme by going to the ComicPress Options administration menu in the dashboard.

Step 2. Configure

With this instruction file you will have also extracted the ComicPress theme. The folder has a text file in it called comicpress-config.php which you must edit with your custom settings, or use ComicPress Manager to configure the settings. These are the directions for manually editing the configuration file.

The first settings are "$comiccat" (your primary comic category) and "$blogcat" (your primary blog category). You must choose a WordPress category to be your comic category and one to be your blog category. You should then have three categories, Blog, Comic and Uncategorized. Every post made with the comic category, or a child category of the comic category will be treated as a comic post. Every post made with the blog category will be treated as a regular blog post. If you have a fresh installation of WordPress, you will see that it has one default category already made called Uncategorized, find that in Posts|Categories. If a post is made and no category is selected, the post will be assigned to the default category. This is why you will most likely want to change the Uncategorized category to be your comic category or your blog category for convenience, you can just edit it, and change the name of it as well as the slug (how it will look in a directory structure). By default the blog category is set to "1", to be the default category, so any post you make and do not set a category for, will automatically be published a blog post. If you are posting a comic, you would most likely be more aware of checking the category, or if you use ComicPress Manager, it will automatically select your comic category. On the other hand, you may primarily only post comics and just prefer that to be your default category. The $comiccat default category ID in the config is set to 3, if you create a new category in a new WordPress installation called "Comics", it will automatically be ID 3. To find the ID of your categories, click on the category name in the category listing, then on the following page, in the URL at the top of your browser you will see the ID of that category at the end of the URL. That is the number to enter in your ComicPress Config file should you need to change from the defaults.

The next settings are for the folders, "$comic_folder", "$rss_comic_folder" and "$archive_comic_folder". You will need to create a comics subfolder at your website. The default name of the folder is "comics". If you would like to use a different folder name, just create that folder at your site and set this setting accordingly. You can also set the folder of your archive or RSS feed. This is only if you want your archive or RSS feed to use different images when displaying the comic that you will have to upload to these separate folders. For example you may want a smaller version of your comics to appear in the archive pages (can also be done with the next setting) or maybe you just want a teaser frame to appear in the RSS feed.

The next setting "$archive_comic_width", is the width your comic images will appear on archive and search results pages. You can set it to any value, it will be displayed in pixels.

Their is a setting called "$rss_comic_width", but it is only valid if you are using ComicPress Manager as it can resize your comics to a different size for your feed.

The final setting is "$blog_postcount". This controls the number of posts that display in your blog on the front page. The number of posts on all other pages are controlled from the setting in your WordPress Administration area under Settings|Reading|Blog pages show at most. The default blogs per page for WordPress is 10, which is nice when searching through an archive, but you might find that to be a bit heavy on a front page of a site already featuring a comic post at the top.

One setting that is recommended (not necessary) that you make in WordPress is to your permalinks, to make them more attractive, better for linking, and better for search engines. Go to Settings|Permalinks and select [x] Custom and put in /%category%/%postname%/.

Step 3. Publish Comics

If you are using ComicPress Manager, this is a pretty simple step, you can select a comic file to upload from QuomicPress on the dashboard, or at the bottom of the Posts|Add New page. It will even handle renaming the file appropriately for you, but you should read on to understand file naming a bit better.

Without ComicPress Manager you will first need to upload your comic file with your choice of FTP software, to the comics folder you specified earlier. The file format can be a JPG, GIF, PNG or SWF. It must be named in date format YYYY-MM-DD. A GIF comic to be posted on May 10th, 2008, would have the filename: 2008-05-10.gif. You can also include extra information after the date in the filename, perhaps you want to include the comic number and it's your 305th comic: 2008-05-10-0305.gif. Or you might include the post title for easy reference of the comic file, 2008-05-10-falling-off-a-cliff.gif. You could even just throw in some scrambled letters so that visitors can't "peek" ahead at future comics, 2008-05-10-qwxfdg.gif (ComicPress Manager can do this for you as well). If you want to use your own date naming format then you can easily set that with the ComicPress Manager, or it can be done manually if you are confident enough to brave the functions.php file in the theme folder. If you are uploading an SWF (Flash) comic file you will need to include the height and width of the file. To do this you must create two custom fields when posting the comic, one named "fwidth" and one named "fheight"(their values should reflect the Flash file's width and height values).

Now that your comic file is in place, all you need to do is create a post dated the same that the comic is named after and select the comic category for that post. ComicPress will take care of the rest, always displaying the associated comic along with that post in the comic area of the theme.

To post a non-comic post, one to appear in your blog section, just select the blog category for it. All posts must be either marked as in the comic category (or a child category of the comic category) or the blog category. They can be in other categories as well (though it is suggested you take advantage of tags for doing much categorization) but must be in at least one of those two categories so that ComicPress knows how to handle them for you.

Bonus Stuff

Comic Hover Text

You may like to have some text that show's up when you hover your mouse over the comic image, for a fun secret message or some other application. If you use ComicPress Manager you will see a field at the bottom of the edit post page called <img title>/hover text, in that field you can just add the text there. Otherwise you will need to head to the "Custom Fields" section of the edit post page and create a new custom field, for name use "hovertext" and then enter the text under value.

Transcripts

You may like to include the text from your comic in transcript form, making it more accessible to viewers as well as searchable from your own site or even from Web search engines. ComicPress manager has a field to enter your transcript. If not, again, head to "Custom Fields" and create a new custom field named "transcript". The transcript will be in plain text format but will take into account carriage returns. If you enter a transcript for a comic it will automatically show up with that comic's post.

Storylines

We felt it important to use the WordPress category system to implement this new feature. This will allow it to be more compatible with plugins and future developments of WordPress or your own customization of the ComicPress theme. The category system allows you to make subcategories, or child categories, which will allow you to create volumes, chapters, or as many breakdowns as you would like, even to break a storyline up into parts. As of now there is no way to sort WordPress categories, so this feature currently requires the ComicPress Manager to activate it. ComicPress Manager will keep track of what order your chapter categories should be in. After activating, just create categories as children of the comics category. ComicPress Manager has a category editor that will allow you to sort them in the proper order. When adding a post to a storyline category, just add it to the single category or the single chapter, it is best not to add it to the comics category or any other parent categories. The current storyline will automatically be shown for the comic post.

Archive Pages

WordPress has archiving built in, you can get archive listing for months, years, categories. It can actually be a sufficient archive but you may chose to provide a special comics archive page. To do so, from your WordPress Administration head to Pages|Add New. Enter a title and any text you might want to accompany the archive page in the post area. Now in the right sidebar you will see you have an option for "Template". ComicPress comes with several archive templates, select one and the page is ready to go.
  1. Comic Archive: A list of all comics grouped by year and sorted by month/day.
  2. Comic Year Archive: If you have an extensive archive the comic archive might be a bit long, this will break it up by years.
  3. Comic Calendar Archive: Page includes 12 monthly calendars to choose a day from. Shows one year at a time with a menu for choosing the year you want to see.
  4. Comic Storyline Archive: With storyline mode activated this will create a breakdown of all your volumes/chapters/etc.
  5. Comic Storyline Archive with Thumbs: This will add a page thumb based on the first comic from each of the volumes/chapters. Perfect if you create cover pages for them and post to the corresponding storyline category.



What Next?

ComicPress Manager

If you've read this far, you will no doubt have seen that the ComicPress Manager can assist you with a lot of operations. The ComicPress theme will function just fine without it, publishing comics with it will be a lot easier. You can download it from its plugin page or head to your WordPress Administration, go to Plugins|Add New and search the term "ComicPress"

Widgets

Head to your WordPress Administration area and select Appearance|Widgets. From here you can customize the features on your sidebar(s). Just add any of the listed Widgets to the sidebar, and it will replace the default sidebar with your new combination. Here you will find the standard WordPress Widgets, along with some ComicPress specific ones like Latest Comics, Random Comic, Archive Dropdown and Comic Bookmark.

You can create your own custom content in the sidebar(s) by adding a Text Widget. After adding it just click Edit and then paste in your HTML code (including JavaScript), a handy way to add ad banners. You can also find many other Widgets you can download and add from the WordPress Widget Plugins Category.

Style & Layout Customizing

The ComicPress theme has been designed to look attractive, and be somewhat generic so that it can be used as-is for any comic site. However it has been designed in a clean and simple way that makes customizing it as easy as possible. With a little CSS knowledge you can change your colors and insert graphics where you want them. With a littler more you can even alter the entire layout by resizing and rearranging the DIVs. You will find this latest version of ComicPress should be the easiest to customize and has new and accessible DIVS throughout it to make it easy to style from just the stylesheet.

Plugins

One of the reasons to use WordPress is the wealth of support and plugins. So you might want to check out the WordPress Plugins Directory to see what other features you can add to your site. Keep in mind that too many plugins (specifically process and query intensive ones) can slow down your site and in some cases break it, always be cautious and research each plugin before going live with it on your site.

Our Must-Have Plugin List:

  • Akismet: this plugin comes with WordPress, it blocks comment spam.
  • WP Super Cache: if you plan on getting any traffic you will want this on your side. It caches the dynamic pages to static html pages and will be much less CPU usage on your host/server. Set it to "Clear all cache files when a post or page is published".
  • Google Sitemap Generator: this will create a file for search engines (specifically Google) to use to update their database without crawling your entire site.
  • Feedsmith: while not as important as the previous three plugins, this plugin will allow you to use FeedBurner but still publish your feed as http://yoursite.com/feed. Letting FeedBurner handle your RSS traffic will be easier on your server as well as provide you a handfull of feed managment/analysis tools.
  • ComicPress Manager: In case you somehow missed it previously in this document. :)
  • ComicPress/CommPress Companion: A CSS Editor for ComicPress that makes it easy for you to retain your original installation intact for easy upgrading.

Help!

If you get stumped or something's not working right, don't worry, you're not the first. Just head over to the friendly and resourceful ComicPress Support Forum where fellow ComicPress users are constantly helping each other out.