Kaitou

Well, due to a disk failure, and the need to rebuild my computer, Monday’s comic will be out Monday evening, sometime.

I have preliminary pencils done, but no wording. (And, trust me, you don’t want to see my prelim pencils. I’ve seen a 3 year old’s crayon scrawls that make more sense than these.)

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 a child theme: use the child 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.
• Cast Page
  To add a cast page:
  1. Add your character in the comics ->characters page.
  2. Create a page and add the shortcode: [cast-page]
     at an appropriate spot (it could be the only thing on the page).

  To add cast images:

  1. Upload the image to your site, noting the location where it went.
  2. Add the following for each character to your style.css (or equiv.) file:.character-slug {
background: url('file-location') top center no-repeat;
}where:
     • slug is the character slug from the Characters page.
     • file is the URL pointing to the image. This can either be a full or relative URL.

     Example:
     .character-blob-2 {
background: url('/wp-content/uploads/blob.png') top center no-repeat;
}


  If you uploaded it using the media upload, you can find the location by editing the image in the Media->Library page and looking at the “File URL” entry in the right column.

• Archive Page
  For the archives page, just create a new page and add the shortcode: [comic-archive]
  where you want your archive listing to show up on that page.
  If you used chapters, you can make separate entries for each by adding the chapter keyword, e.g., [comic-archive chapter=1] where the chapter number corresponds to the ID found in the Comics->Chapters page.
  Additionally, you can add a thumbnail for said chapter by adding thumbnail=1
  to the shortcode, e.g., [comic-archive chapter=1 thumbnail=1]

A recent addition (sometime before Jan 2017) is the list=num option where num indicates the list style:

0. (default) all chapters
1. do it for series that have parent-%gt;child (chapter= does not work)
2. by year; lists years as links followed by listing for year last clicked (default = current year)
3. shows entire list separated by year headers
4. list by chapter thumbnails