Hello,

I am currently working on converting my site over to a wordpress with comicpress theme and am having some issues getting this to work. I was wondering if you would mind helping me a little bit? What I would really like to know is how you get the avatars to show up next to your blog posts? I am having the hardest time doing this.

Thank you in advance if you can help me.
~John Horsley

Sure thing. It’s actually just a bit of hackery involving the way ComicPress shows the comic images. ComicPress calls a function called comic_display() on the posts in the comic categories. What I did was create a similar function called comic_thumb(), and I use it on non-comic posts. It still means you have to create a little image for each post and upload it the same way you upload the comics.

On top of that there’s a bit of CSS to get the image positioned the way I want it, but that’s basically it.

Hope that helps you with your site!

Thanks! That’s an interesting way to do it, About 2 hours after I posted my question to you I got a method working with gravatars that will display my avatar like I want it to, so that works for me!
I REALLY like the layout of your site, as well as I like your webcomic.
I am still building my comicpress version of my site (it can be seen at http://jhorsley3.com/y2cl and it is a massive work in progress (I have 270 archived strips to upload into this format!)
Not that I want to steal from your website, but I like your how you outlined the tables. Did you do that in CSS?
Also, Do you mind if I link to your site from mine? I am trying to build a good circle of web-comic friends. You would think I would have done that in the FIRST 5 years I ran my comic strip!

Hey, thanks, and yes, feel free to link to me

This site is thankfully free of tables! It’s all DIVs and yes, it’s done in CSS. You can download the current version of the full code for this modification of ComicPress (see the link in this post), but I recommend that you install Firebug for Firefox and use it to examine in real time how this things work.

Anyways, Imaginary Daughter has a somewhat complicated layout full of DIVs, I don’t really recommend that you get into it unless you know what you’re doing; but there should be something in there that you can use for your site. And of course, ask away if you want to know anything specific. Cheers!

Hello again! I’m glad to see you’ve updated the comic again, fun! The website looks a lot better, as well. One thing though, in my opinion the “browse comics” section on the right isn’t that easy to navigate, so maybe that can be made easier? Just a suggestion ^^:;.. I still love your comic! I’ve started with my own, as well. I’ll link you as soon as I put it online!

Hey! Thanks again for your kind words. In the end I decided to stop worrying about how the comic looks and just do my best.

About the navigation, I’m currently considering other options, we’ll see what happens there.

I’d love to see your comic, hurry up and post it online!

thanks! I got firebug and it’s pretty neat. I need to play around with it more.

I linked you to my site, you will show up on every page as long as there are updates! haha. I like your newest strip alot, reminds me of my old apartment. all one room

Thank you so very much, John. Remember to drop by if you ever need help with all this stuff

Ok, I need help! lol. If you look at my site y2clcomic.com and peruse the archives, the sidebars drop down and don’t stay next to the comic… it’s driving me nuts trying to figure it out. Any ideas?

Your site looked fine to me in Firefox, but there are some serious issues in IE. For some reason the left sidebar is getting split somewhere between the “site stats” and the “visits” section. Try deactivating those widgets for a while to see if one of them is causing the problem.

Besides that, the other reason why sidebars sometimes drop in WordPress is due to CSS rending differences between IE and [everything else]. The easiest way to solve this is to make your DIVs a couple of pixels thinner so that there’s extra room for IE to expand them without causing the sidebar to drop.

Hope that helps!

I deactivated the site stats and that fixed the splitting problem. I know there are issues with IE, but no idea why. as far as making the DIVs thinner, do you mean on the sidebars or in the main pages? I made the right sidebar thinner last night and it’s placing in the right spot in IE now, only if you cruise the archives the middle will drop to the bottom. CONFUSING.

do you have any ideas of how to keep the sidebars up next to the comic? is it something with my ’single.php’ file or the ‘archive.php’ file?

The thing with DIVs and IE is that IE treats width definitions a bit different than other browsers. So if you specify that your sidebar is 200 pixels wide but it has some borders and padding and margin, other browsers will render it at 200 pixels wide but IE will make it, say, 210 pixels wide. That might make it larger than the space remaining next to your other divs, and so the browser pushes it down after the other divs. If you have several divs side to side, as in most WordPress themes, the problem is compounded because each div is pushing the others a bit to the right and so you might have to fix them all in order for the last div not to drop.

As for the middle dropping in your single pages, that’s because you’ve modified your index.php so that the comic sits nested between two sidebars rather than the default ComicPress behaviour of showing the comic by itself on top of the posts and sidebar; you’ll have to do a similar change in your single.php file, which is still behaving in the default ComicPress way.

You might be interested in trying out this variation of the ComicPress theme that’s been tweaked to have 3 columns by default.

Cheers,

the funny thing is I am using that 3 column version that I have been modifying to fit my site. I don’t honestly remember changing anything on the index.php page that would make the sidebars stay up. I’ve compared the two pages and for the life of me I can not see what is making them stay up on index.php and fall down on single.php. I’ll keep looking, but damn it’s frustrating!

I know what you mean, it makes you want to punch someone. Not to make your life harder than it already is, but have you tried looking at your site in different browsers? I was a happy camper until I tried my site on IE7. Damn, it was bad! I worked and tweaked and puttzed about until I got it right. And then I tried it in IE6…

yeah, I’ve looked at my site in ie6 (looks ok now) and safari (works fine there) and opera (it looks fine only things disappear) and firefow (works great, minus the sidebars dropping)

i’m comparing index.php and single.php right now and NOTHING I can come up with is different enough to make the sidebars drop. I’ve checked the style.css file and I can’t see anything there.

Any ideas??

Well, I’m not familiar with the 3 column version of ComicPress but a quick Firebug inspection of your single page shows that the div containing the comic is outside of the page div, whereas in the home page it is inside the div page (and then inside a few other divs such as leftcolumnscontainer and so on). If I had to guess I’d say that you’re generating the comic from the header.php in the case of single pages and on the index.php for the home page. Check where the calls to comic_display() are placed. If you still can’t make it work, maybe add some comments to this thread. Good luck!