Adding Comics

Adding Comics
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When creating a comic post in stripShow, you do not need to insert the comics in your post itself; stripShow finds the appropriate comics when it displays the post.

There are four methods for entering comics:

The Traditional Method

Back in the old days of webcomics production on WordPress, the way to get a comic file associated with a blog post was to handle them both separately; you would create a comic file named in your chosen date format (such as 20090213.gif), then upload it using FTP to your sever. Then you'd go to WordPress's Add New page and enter a blog post, making sure to set the correct category and date. All in all, a big waste of time.

The Add Comics Page

A more convenient way to enter comics into your archive is to use stripShow's Add Comics page. This page is designed to resemble WordPress's Add New page, including a rich text editor.

From this page, you can enter a title for that day's comic, a blog post to accompany the comic, and upload one or more comic files. You can enter or select tags for your post, just as in the normal WordPress Add New page. Any posts entered in this fashion wil automatically be assigned the category you've selected for comics on the stripShow Options page.

	Note
	Please note the Add another file button next to the upload field. This allows you to upload more than one file at once, but each file will be associated with the same comic post unless you select Bulk Import.

Bulk Upload

More than one comic can be uploaded at once. Selecting Bulk Import from the Publish box allows you to create a new post for each of the files you're uploading.

Some restrictions apply. At present, stripShow does not allow you to customize the title or content of the posts you're entering, beyond some basic date-related functions (see Date Replacement, below). Bulk upload can be time-saving or time-consuming, depending on the extent to which you like to have your comics differentiated from one another.

In addition, because there's no opportunity to specify the post date for each comic you're uploading, the comic files must include, at the beginning of their filename, a date. This date must conform to the date format set in stripShow Options.

All files uploaded using this method will be associated with their posts using the comic_file metadata (see the section called “Custom comic files”).

Date Replacement

To distinguish one bulk-uploaded comic from another, you can enter the comic's date in your title and content by way of a wildcard tag. stripShow looks for the word date in curly brackets, followed by a PHP strftime code, like: {date %A, %B %e, %Y}, and converts it to the date of the imported comic. That particular example would yield the string Sunday, February 15, 2009.

Note that this code, prior to stripShow 2.1, used the formatting of the PHP date() function, and now uses the formatting of the strftime() function. This is because date() outputs dates only in English, whereas strftime() takes your current locale settings into account.

Additional codes that can be used in this tag can be found in Appendix B, PHP Date Codes.

Bulk Import

If you've already uploaded a collection of comic files, stripShow has an option to import them as a group into the WordPress blog.

This option has the same restrictions as Bulk Upload. Comics must be named with dates, and no customization of the title or content is possible beyond that mentioned in Date Replacement.

All files found in your comic folder (also specified in stripShow Options) that have properly-formatted dates in their filenames will be imported, unless that file is already associated with a comic post. Multiple files that begin with the same date will be imported aand attached to one post.