Superior

I have to admit, I tried Comic Press a long time ago, got terribly discouraged, and gave up. But at least some of that was because I was not happy using WordPress, and half of it didn’t work because of my lousy OS. Since then, WordPress has come a long way, I got free of !@#$! Windows, and Comic Press functionality branched off into this great plugin.

Because I was curious, I also recently tried Automattic’s Panel. It’s OK, but it’s got a long way to go. Most importantly, the support team doesn’t seem to understand webcomics and its peculiar needs like Frumph does. One user asked in their support forum if it was possible to link the comic to the next page–this is a common practice in webcomics, and of course the user was looking for *automated* navigation, as is available in Comic Easel. The support team’s response was that, sure, you can link your image file to any URL you want! By hand…oh, heavens to Betsy.

And, of course, Panel has the same template limitation as the original Comic Press, only without the multiple layout options of Comic Press. So Comic Easel is still the best way to organize comics in WordPress.

Since I have been setting up a new site, I’ve been trying out a variety of WordPress templates, and it was easy to install Comic Easel in child copies one by one to see if it would integrate OK. The comic module fit in fine with just about everything I tried–there were a couple of oddly configured templates that might have taken more figuring, but out of the dozen or more I tried, it was a snap in every other case.

You may still need to hack some stuff. My website name is not the name of the comic, so in the ‘index.php’ file above the Comic Easel code, I added a small header. No biggie! A little CSS tweaking here and there, you’re in business.

Thanks for helping out the struggling cartoonist all these years, Frumph!