Manga+Press

Some “exciting” information on the next release of Manga+Press, version 2.1.I’ve been hard at work since my last post, where I made the list of things I wanted to remove or change with Manga+Press. Well, what I’ve done is I’ve taken a good long look at that list and reviewed the things I thought could be changed or just removed. What I’ve decided is this:

• The Banner Skin option.
  Is gone. In it’s place is a bit of HTML and CSS-P trickery, which places the control of the overlay in the hands of the theme designer. I do suspect that a lot of people probably didn’t understand what the overlay or “banner skin” was really for, anyway. What it was supposed to do was allow for a way to blend the comic banner into the layout. Which was all fine and dandy except in the older versions of Manga+Press, you had to upload a banner skin through Manga+Press for it to be used. Not to mention that it was really a waste of webserver space because you basically had two versions of the banner being generated—the overlayed one and the none-overlayed one. I’m thinking about taking the optimization a step further and using a script called TimThumb. Very useful script because all it does is generates and caches images on the fly and deletes them when they’re no longer needed. Which is the perfect option for Manga+Press when you think about it. That could potentially eliminate the need for placing the code in the excerpt or for that matter, having the banner option in the first place!
• The database tables.
  After looking at the code again, I’ve come to realize that yeah, the tables are needed. So they’re staying.
• The series/category manager & Manage Series tab.
  Made some slight changes here, mostly in how the page is named.
• Manga+Press Main Page.
  Made some changes to the main page, or “dashboard.” Added a “What’s New” panel and a “Featured Comics” panel. Also made some stylistic changes.
• Manga+Press Themes.
  Changed a few things within Manga+Press to make adapting themes a little easier. Manga+Press will now exclude the comic category from the front page automatically as well as set up the comic page for displaying the latest comic. The code for comic navigation will still have to be added manually.
• Sidebar Widget.
  And this is where my short attention span reasserts itself ^_^ Maybe in a future version xD

And so there you have it. That is what you’re going to see in Manga+Press 2.1. Basically a leaner, meaner and easier to use version of Manga+Press. I’m attempting to figure out a way of inserting the navigation code automatically as well but it’s kind of a no-go at the moment