Updates and thoughts

I put the roadmap on hold. Long story short, I’ve been off learning new things and improving my artwork. I’m foreseeing that I’m probably going to be away for a little bit longer. How long, I don’t know. Which means that I’m not answering support questions on the WordPress forum while I’m on this break.

Which leads me to this: I’ve given thought to a few different plans regarding Manga+Press:

  1. Actively bring on help
  2. Give the project up for adoption
  3. Simply abandon the project

Honestly, I’d rather do Option 1 but I can’t seem to get anyone interested in taking on development, testing, or documentation writing. All of which I need help with. Which leads me to give some consideration to either Option 2 or Option 3.

So, thoughts?

Manga+Press 4.0…and 5.0?!?

That was finished — almost — quickly. I’m pleased to announce that Manga+Press 4.0 will be out next month.

New features coming in Manga+Press 4.0:

  • Comic bookmarking
  • Lightbox
  • Random comic link
  • Social media integration

Manga+Press 5.0 will follow by the end of the year. I’ve made a command decision to focus heavily on redesigning the way the Series taxonomy works. As it currently is, the Series taxonomy causes some confusion in how navigation is supposed to work. What I’m looking at doing is splitting Series into three different taxonomies: Series, Issues, and Chapters, with possibly adding a Series or Issue cover option — where you can designate a comic post as a “cover” page. These changes could have some rather profound effects on the way the Archive and Latest Comic pages behave as well. I have an issue on Github detailing what’s going to happen with Series. You’ll note that the issue itself dates back to 2014, so this has been on my mind for a while now.

What happens to Manga+Press NEXT then? That project is officially dead. The other point of Manga+Press 5.0 is to integrate the changes from NEXT into Manga+Press core itself — namely the refactored navigation and unit testing. I unintentionally refactored quite a bit of Manga+Press core in 4.0, and that effectively killed NEXT. Chances are, the NEXT-to-5.0 integration will happen first, then the changes to the UI.

Till next time!

Manga+Press 3.0 Released!

Bye bye Child-themes

Upgrade note: the bundled child-themes have been removed. If/when you do upgrade, make sure to move those themes to wp-content/themes IF you’re using them. If you’re not using them, then you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. The old themes are available for download on the Themes page. I won’t be updating these themes going forward, nor will I be adding new child-themes when WordPress releases a new one.

Update Thoughts

This update has been almost 2 years in the making. If I recall, the last update I had was version 2.9 at the end of 2014. In time for the update, I’ve done a lot of work updating the documentation and moving it over to Gitbook, and dividing it into two sections: Getting Started, and Developers.

For the Future

So what does this mean for Manga+Press NEXT, since my initial idea for that was to branch off. Well, Manga+Press NEXT is dead. I realized that I don’t want the headache of trying to maintain two different versions, and the development on that project has pretty much stalled. So, I’m planning Manga+Press 4.0 with some new features and ideas — suggestions from the community plus my own ideas. I may do like the WordPress Core devs and do these features as separate plugins to test them out before integrating into the main plugin.

Till next time!

Manga+Press 2.9.3, Manga+Press 3.0 and WordPress 4.8

Manga+Press 2.9.3 has been tested with WordPress 4.8, and has been shown to work fine with the defaults so I’ve updated the WordPress repo accordingly.

Yes, there’s going to be a Manga+Press 3.0 — and maybe (eventually) a Manga+Press NEXT. Manga+Press 3.0 will be released either this weekend or next week sometime, and I finally made the decision to pull the child-themes from Manga+Press completely. Yes, you’re reading that correctly. Manga+Press 3.0 WILL NOT have child-themes. I made the decision because I got tired of going back and forth on it, plus I could never get good usage data on whether or not these themes are being used, or if they’re at all helpful. As for features, Manga+Press 3.0 adds these features to the Comic Archive page:

  • Sorting options
  • Calendar template
  • Gallery template

There is also a Manga+Press 3.5 that’ll add an additional feature called comic bookmarking, which allows a user to keep track of where they’ve left off while reading.

Anyway, that’s it. Yes, this seems sudden but I’ve finally had some free time dedicate to the plugin and get it updated properly. Stay tuned!

Manga+Press 2.9.3 and WordPress 4.7

I performed quick tests over this weekend to determine any issues between Manga+Press 2.9.3 and WordPress 4.7. So far, I haven’t found any but I also haven’t tried a complete run (installation, setup, add comic, etc.). Once I do that, I’ll make sure to update the readme in the plugin directory. With that, I have no idea how Manga+Press will work with the REST API but the assumption is that it should just work because I’m not doing anything crazy, I’m using out-of-the-box WordPress functionality.

Development has stalled on Manga+Press NEXT — due to life and other unforeseen issues, like my my renewed interest in drawing and 3D illustration. I still have some thoughts about removing the child-themes from 2.9.x, though. All of the sites I’ve seen so far that use Manga+Press don’t bother with the child-themes, so it may be safe to remove them (bye-bye bloatware).

Ran into issues this weekend with Jetpack on the website after I upgraded the server. Turns out that during the upgrade, PHP’s XML module was never enabled—d’oh. First noticed the issue when Publicize wasn’t working correctly, and took me two days to figure out what was going on. Finally checked server logs, and yup—no XML module. Oh well.

Finally, manga-press.com itself now has https enabled!