I have a laundry list of things I need to fix and changes I want to make.

Hello!

I recently updated my old comicpress (which was around 2.9) to the newest version of comicpress and everything broke. Quite literally everything. I’ve spent a week playing around with some of the settings and at least now I can display my content, but I have a huge laundry list of things I still need to fix. While I’m about it, I’d also like to update my site’s aesthetic to be a little nicer. Again, I have a big list of things I’m trying to do.

So, for reference, here is my page: https://comicpress.socksandpuppets.com/ Aesthetically, I’d like to get something close to Sarah Sobole’s wonderful https://doctorcatmd.com/

I’m somewhat familiar with CSS. I have no idea how to write anything in PHP. I’m currently using the base comicpress theme. I’m aware that the site I’m looking at for a reference uses greymatter – but when I try using that theme, it adds a huge number of things that I don’t want, and can’t get rid of.

So, here’s a list of things I’d like to change but I have no idea how to do. Any help with any of them would be greatly appreciated. Please if I need to edit any CSS or PhP files, it would be helpful to have an idea of where they’re stored – currently all my directories are in the default structure:

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1) It used to be the case that when I clicked “comic” in the menubar, it’d take me to the comic homepage. Now it takes me to a broken “No Archive” page. I can’t find any way to make this link work like I’d want to. I could delete it from the menubar, and replace it with a static page redirect to the comic frontpage, but I don’t think it’s meant to work like that (and, I’d like the “home” button in the menubar to light up when that’s the page that’s currently being viewed – as it does in the Dr. Cat comic page. If I do a static redirect, it won’t do that.)

I think the problem here might be something to do with comicpress – config in the wordpress dashboard. There, there’s an option to set the “comic category” (it’s set to “blog posts” by default.) – I can’t edit this in any way, the page says that changing these options will give me code to paste into comicpress-config.php, but editing the options and hitting “submit” just generates a large empty text box, and a message that I don’t have a config file.

2) The archive page no longer generates an archive. I have no idea how to fix this. It used to generate one! – I’m looking for a list of text links, a bit like the blog link generates – and ideally I’d like to generate a complete list in the archive page.

3) It used to be the case that my commenters would have custom gravatars generated from a folder of custom gravatars I uploaded. Now they’re stuck using the default ones, and the option to select a custom folder doesn’t have any folders for me to choose. How do I get this back?

4) I really want to remove the right sidebar. I don’t have a lot of content or advertising or any other stuff I want to display alongside my posts, and the cleanest format for my comic would be to have a single content column all the way down the page. Unfortunately, comicpress doesn’t provide a “1 column” layout option, so I’m forced to have two. I’d suggest this as a feature for future versions, but for now, is there any way for me to change the format to only have the content column, without displaying any sidebars?

5) It’s not really possible to edit much to do with the menubar from inside the comicpress options. I’d like to be able to change the menubar text colour and style, including the menubar hover, and having the page you’re currently on a different colour of text – how do I change any of this stuff? The DrCat website manages this pretty much perfectly.

6) The menu options that let you skin the comic navigation used to give me a series of button options, and tell me where I could upload my own graphics. Now, this function doesn’t seem to do anything. I’d like to replace the awful looking comic navigation with my own custom buttons, and remove the pixel-wide box drawn around the navigation menu. Again Dr. Cat has this done in the style I want.

Additionally, I’d like to have an archives link rather than a random link as the central button.

7) The comic/post wrapper in Dr.Cat has rounded corners, where mine has pointed ones. I’d like to make that change – the pointed corners look a bit 1990s to me.

8) I’d like to be able to draw custom social media buttons and use those, rather than the defaults.

9) There used to be an option to add or remove the tiny navigation arrows that live in the menubar. I can’t find it any more, and I’d like to remove those arrows.

10) This is really minor, but the social media buttons and the “n comments” and “comments RSS” links link at the bottom of my comic post are all on their own lines. This generates a large amount of wasted whitespace between the post and the comments. I’d save space and it’d look a bit nicer if I could put all three elemets on the same line. Where’s the template code that would let me edit this, and what would I need to do to make it

Any help with these issues would be very much appreciated. Most of the documentation I can find is very complex, and I just don’t understand it.