This version has been a long time in the making, with many stops and starts, life getting in the way, and so on and so forth. Sadly, while the features that I had planned didn’t make their way into this version, I am very glad to finally get it out the door.

A lot of changes have been made to how Manga+Press 4.0 handles templates, so if you’re not comfortable upgrading, stay on Manga+Press 3.0, which does support the current WordPress version.

Other changes with Manga+Press 4.0 involves the use of Composer autoloading, and ditching support for old PHP versions. Going forward, Manga+Press 4.0 supports PHP 7.0 and newer.

The issue that initially prompted the re-write, which dealt with using the Latest Comic page as the home page has been fixed. As part of that fix, I added a new custom post-type, called Comic Pages. Right now, you can use them mainly for the Latest/Archive Comic pages (and they work the same way as a standard page), but I’ve maintained backwards compatibility for the default WordPress pages as well.

One new feature that I added was a “Cover Image” field. While working on the new Manga+Press version, I noticed that TwentyNineteen added the featured image to the header. Manga+Press reuses the “Featured Image” feature to display comics. I realized that it would be cool to add a preview or “cover” image for the comic to occupy that same space. To enable this field, you will need to add add_theme_support('mangapress', ['cover-images']); to your theme’s functions.php file. With that, there are three functions that you can use to load the cover image: mangapress_the_comic_cover, mangapress_has_cover_image, and mangapress_theme_supports_cover_images. To see cover images in action, enable TwentyNineteen. As of now, TwentyNineteen is the only theme that supports the feature.

In the coming days, there will be documentation updates and tutorials showing how to integrate the new version of Manga+Press with 3rd party themes. Until then, I highly recommend not upgrading unless you have a strong understanding of PHP and WordPress, and are comfortable modifying your own themes!

Manga+Press 4.0 will be released this weekend. Technically, it’s ready to go now, but WordPress 5.3 is due out any day. It would be prudent for me to wait to release it until I’ve had a chance to test with the newest WordPress version.

The only thing left to do is update the documentation. With 4.0, the way themes are handled has been changed completely. There’s now an API using custom actions and filters that allows 3rd party themes to provide support for Manga+Press. There are also new features, such as Comic Pages, and Cover Images (for themes that support them, of course), that I also need to document.

On the note about documentation: I’m moving the documentation back to Gitbook, where it’s easier to maintain. I’m not sure why I decided on a Github Pages implementation, but frankly, it isn’t working well.

Sadly, some of the ideas that were originally going to be part of 4.0 were put on the back-burner for the re-write. Those feature additions will likely be in a future release.

Now that the move has settled, I’ve turned my attention to Manga+Press 4.0. Long story short, it turned into a much-needed code-refactor. I’ve taken what I’ve learned from my current job, and applied it here. Basically, I refactored the Manga+Press code-base to be PSR-4 compliant and added in a Laravel-esque project structure. Granted, that doesn’t mean much to the end-users but I’m hoping that it makes maintainability somewhat easier for the future.

Basically, it means the original Manga+Press 4.0 beta that was announced last fall is off the table because of the rewritten code. I’m pushing for a holiday surprise with this release, especially since I haven’t had a major release in over 2 years.

#WIP Manga+Press 4.0 Features and Fixes

• #CodeUpdate: The other part of Manga+Press 4.0 is I’m working on adding “compatibility” features for the default WordPress themes instead of relying on child-themes.
• #BugReport: I’m also working on a bug that got reported last year about the Latest Comic/Archive Pages being used as the home page. I mentioned it in Updates and Thoughts on Recent Error Reports. Basically, I’m taking approaches 1 and 2 with the problem.
• #Feature: While working on the new Manga+Press version, I noticed that TwentyNineteen added the featured image to the header. Manga+Press reuses the “Featured Image” feature to display comics. I realized that it would be cool to add a preview or “cover” image for the comic to occupy that same space.
• #Additional: Adding support for using add_theme_support('mangapress'). Only feature supported at the moment is the “Cover Images” feature described above. This will allow 3rd themes to add in support for Cover Images by declaring add_theme_support('mangapress', ['cover-images']); in the theme’s functions.php file.

Anyway, I’m planning on a New Year’s release so cross your fingers!