Adding Comics

Having stripShow set up and running, now you need to get some comics into your archive. There are two ways of doing so: one at a time, and in in bulk.

The Add Posts page
The easiest way to add comics to your archive is to simply use WordPress's own Add page. This is the same page you use to add any blog post, and you get to it by selecting Posts->Add New from WordPress's admin menu.

stripShow adds a new section to this page, the stripShow box:



This panel consists of several parts:
 * This post is a comic: This checkbox is unchecked by default. Check it and the rest of the panel appears. Your post will also be put into your Comics category at this time.
 * Orientation:For themes (like stripShow Sandbox) that include the ability to differentiate horizonal and vertical comics, you can select the comic's orientation here.
 * Mouseover Text:You can specify a custom message to appear when readers hover their cursor over this comic (see the popular comic XKCD for a well-known example of this).
 * Comic Files:This field allows you to upload comic files directly into WordPress. These files will be placed in your comics folder.
 * You can add as many comic files to a given post as you want. Remember that these files will be displayed in alphabetical/numerical order in your comics, not the order in which you enter them here!
 * After you save your post, the files you've already uploaded will be listed above the Comic Files field. You can remove any of them by clicking the "X" icon next to them.

Characters
In addition to the fields in the stripShow box, there's another box that directly relates to comics.



This box is, by default, over to the right of the page. Here, you can enter the names of characters that appear in your comic, just as though they were post tags. The box even behaves like the Tags box, with automatic completion. Type the first few letters of a character's name, and if you've entered that name before, it will suggest a list of possible characters for you to select.

Import Comics
If you have a lot of comics to import into your archive (say, for example, you're migrating from another webcomics package), you probably don't want the repetition of creating a post for each one individually. Fortunately, stripShow provides a means of importing several comics at a time.

To access stripShow's import options, select stripShow->Import Comics from the admin menu.



There are two tabs here: Bulk Import and Bulk Upload.

The Bulk Import tab
This tab allows you to bring comics that already exist in your comics folder into your archive. It doesn't matter how they got there, whether they were uploaded from the Bulk Upload tab or using FTP or some other method. As long as they're there, and in a format stripShow can use, they will be listed here.

The first option on the Bulk Upload tab is the Start on date. You can choose which date the first comic file to be imported represents (comic files are imported in alphabetical/numerical order). You can specify which days of the week should have comics. Check or uncheck the boxes as you see fit.

Below this, you can opt to have stripShow respect dates in filenames. What this means is, if you import a comic file called 20100201.png, stripShow will recognize that as a date (in YYYYMMDD format), and set the date for the resulting post to February 1, 2010. The date must be in the format you've set on the Options page.

Next comes the list of files themselves. Each file has a place to type a custom title and content. In addition, if it turns out there is a date in the filename, then it's possible there may be a comic post in your archive for that date, that doesn't happen to have a comic file associated with it yet. If stripShow finds such a post, it will show you a dropdown menu below the filename, so you can choose to either attach the file to that post, or to create a new post.