Thursday
30Oct
Essential Plug-ins for ComicPress / Wordpress
Brad Guigar
Many webcartoonists are using Tyler Martin's excellent ComicPress theme for customizing the look and feel of Wordpress. I've been using both over a year now, and I have been very happy with the overall flexibility, ease-of-use, and power that the ComicPress/Wordpress duo provides.
So you've installed them both. Now what?
One of the best aspects of Wordpress is its customizability. There are many plug-ins available that can tailor your site in a multitude of ways. Here are a few of what I would consider "essential" plug-ins that CP/WP cartoonists should install.
WP Super-Cache: You may not think your site will ever get listed on popular social networking sites like StumbleUpon or Digg, but it can happen. The upside of being listed on those sites is the extra surge of traffic your site will receive. The downside to the extra traffic is not being able to withstand it. WP Super-Cache will generate static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog, allowing your site to survive a flood of traffic. This very scenario happened to my website a few weeks ago, and I didn't have WP Super-Cache installed. My site was taken down for several hours as a result. Be prepared, use WP Super-Cache!
Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form: Currently at version 2.0, this plug-in will generate a custom form your readers can use to get in touch with you. Set-up is very easy and intuitive. This form protects the privacy of your e-mail address and allows you to customize the form contents and design. Best of all, no coding is required!
Akismet: Yes, this plug-in comes bundled in with every standard Wordpress install. Akismet will prevent SPAM comments from ever showing up on your Web site. If a legitimate comment shows up as SPAM, you can always moderate it as a valid comment.
Comment Timeout: This plug-in automatically closes comments on blog entries after a user-configurable period of time. There are options that allow you to keep older comment threads open, or place a fixed limit on the number of comments in the discussion.
On a side note, I use MARSedit 2 to write my posts, queue them up for specific times of the day, and preview them without having to use a Web browser. It works beautifully with Wordpress, and is a must-have if you are maintaining several Wordpress-based sites. The best part of this app is that if your site's database ever gets munged, all your posts are available to access from MARSedit. This application is Mac only and costs under $30.
Reader Comments (22)
I think this is probably the bare minimum for a WP installs. There must be some others to take the site to the next level though. I'd be interested in learning more about those.
I agree, these are the minimum everyone should have.
I'm wondering if there is a good pluging for mailing lists. I don't see that many cartoonists using one on their site and I'm wondering if it's because there are none or if it's because they don't want to.
[...] [Software] Wordpress plug-ins for ComicsPress Link: Krishna Sadasivam [...]
hey guys - many thanks for publishing the article. The URL to my site is pcweenies.net - not pcwenies.net :)
[...] If you haven’t been over there yet, let me recommend particularly Krishna Sadasivam’s practical tips on using ComicPress, Dave Kellett’s interview with Karl Kerschl, and Chris Eliopoulos’s on how you either [...]
I'd love to see more articles dealing with the technical side like this in the future. Keep it up. Maybe the next one could dive a bit deeper in the realm of plugins? Thanks!
I think these are all great picks, but I think leaving out Comic Press Manager is a bit of a miss. Comic Press is great, but Comic Press Manager makes it truly awesome and much easier to use.
There are other plugins I would suggest as well, but I don't want to hi-jack this well done article!
Krishna: I *think* you may have typed your URL in incorrectly when you filled out the form for your profile because that byline is generated automatically. You should be able to fix this problem on your side. If not, shoot me an e-mail, k?
Helpful as always Krishna! I was wondering about the super-cache thing. Is something like this needed for *any* site that uses PHP, or is it just because WordPress is so memory intensive? For example, I wrote my site myself, and although it uses PHP, it's pretty bare bones compared to WordPress (such as, I don't interface with a MySQL database). Am I leaving myself open for this kind of site failure, or am I at least a *little* more safe because my site is simpler?
@tpiro - you are right in that you are *more safe* than a site than also had the overhead of a database, and a barebones wordpress is probably *safer* than one with every single plugin running. But even a static html site can fall over under a heavy slashdotting if you are on a cheap/overcrowded/underresourced shared hosting plan.
So I guess the answer to your question is (unhelpfully) yes, you are leaving yourself open, and yes, you are a little more safe.
Thanks! That's what I expected, but I'm no expert in this stuff, so I just wanted to check.
That's a great bit of information to know. But what I'd really like help on is CSS for Comicpress, and how to make it look the way you want it to with custom graphics. Generally, when I make websites, I start with how I want it to look, and then make it functional.
hi Tricia: that's a great article idea. Something that I can envision as a multi-parter. I'm no expert on tweaking Comicpress so I'm not sure if I would be the best fit to write such an article.
Do any of y'all know if it is at all possible to have alt-texts on one's comics in ComicPress, some sort of plugin that could somehow enable it? I switched to using the ComicPress theme from standard WordPress a while back for a variety of reasons, and for the most part I prefer it by a lot. However, it breaks my heart that the way comics are done in ComicPress prevents me from doing alt-texts, which both I and my readers (i.e. like 10 close personal friends) really loved before.
Any help?
I also recommend som automatic upgrader, a sociable bookmaker and some SEO tool.
(And I can't find any sense on the comment timeout thing)
Hey Ben -- alt-text is possible on the ComicPress platform (see my site, wondermark.com, for an example) but it requires some custom coding. (Tyler might be able to give you details if you email him or post in the CP forum.) Not sure if he's going to make it a standard feature of the next release, but I hope he does!
Ah! Thanks a bunch, I will try to look into that.
Looks like webcomics.com could use the Akismet plug-in. Based on all the penis/breast enlargement nonsense that's made it's way into the comments.
Appearances are deceitful :)
I have to cast a vote for Typepad Antispam as a spam solution. It has a better catch rate and less false positives. Also Akismet has been shown to be used as a censorship tool many times previously.
This topic is quite trendy on the Internet right now. What do you pay the most attention to while choosing what to write ?