Kaitou

Sorry (all 3 of you), no comic this week. Should have one next week, if I survive.

Like the site (not that it’s changed much)? Check out the new Archive and Cast pages.

The bulk of those pages are courtesy of Comic Easel, a new WordPress plugin-based comic system brought to you by Philip Hofer (a.k.a. Frumph) who has been maintaining ComicPress for lo these many years. He has 5 (and counting) excellent videos on YouTube Start here and look for the Migrating from CP to CE videos.

Here is my quick how-to and notes for doing the conversion:

If you didn’t use either a child theme or Companion, you will lose any
customizations. You might want to convert to a child theme, first.

• Prep (can be done up-front)
  1. Probably best to upgrade all plugins, themes and WordPress to latest.
  2. Install plugins (don’t have to activate imediately):
     • Comic Easel
     • ComicPress To Comic Easel
     • AJAX Thumbnail Rebuild
  3. Install theme (don’t activate):
     1. Easel
  4. If you are using a child theme, copy comicpress-xxx child theme to easel-xxx. In style.css file, change “@import” url to “../easel/style.css”. The advantage I found with using a child theme is that I didn’t lose the widgets, but save the settings, just in case.
  5. Make sure each comic is in only one category.
  6. Comic image filenames should be canonical date format. cp2ce doesn’t like more than one file with the same date in it.
  7. Take a snapshot of your key pages. I didn’t and couldn’t remember where certain things were supposed to be and what they looked like, exactly. This is a good idea whenever you’re tweaking a site.
• Save old settings
  Write (or copy/paste) this stuff down.
  1. widgets (current ones will be thrown into the inactive set). I found that you can open a widget tab and copy/paste the list. For replicated widgets (e.g., Text), note which one you have as they all will show up as the same name.
  2. comicpress settings: categories (and category numbers), folders, widths)
  3. ComicPress Options: Things like layout, general setting, copyright text, etc.
  4. active widgets (you’ll be deactivating most of these during the upgrade)
• Migration
  1. Activate new plugins, deactivate any other plugins to speed migration (note
     which).
  2. Under cp2ce converter migrate 5 comics first, if it comes back immediately,
     increase the number, if not, continue at current count.
  3. Actvate new theme.
     if using child theme: use the easel-xxx theme, not easel.
  4. Re-enable plugins as noted above.
  5. Re-enable widgets as noted above.
• Post-Trauma

  First, fix all the CSS and stuff to get your site looking the way it did (remember that screenshot I had you take? You know, the one I forgot to do when doing my site.).
  Now you get to add all your characters to the character list and go
  through *all* the comics adding each character in that comic to that
  comic’s list. Fun for all of you OCD people.

  Add a cast page with the shortcode: [cast-page]
  See: this forum page
  Added images and css to display them.

  For the archives page, add the shortcode: [comic-archive]
  See: this forum page
  I added chapters and moved long storylines to them and added thumbnail=1
  to the shortcode to get images to show up.

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