SimpleComic

Intro

SimpleComic is a fairly feature-light webcomic display script. I wrote it for a friend so she could start her comic up. I may improve it further. We will see.

Features

• Multiple comics per day
• Schedule posting of comics in advance
• Masking of comic filenames so scheduled comics can't be easily found
• Comic descriptions, alt text, and transcripts
• Optional chapter divisions for comics
• "Rants" as a lightweight blog, with scheduled posting
• Theming system
• Static pages
• Support for the frontpage showing the first comic from the most recent day with comics, to allow posting of "issues"

Installing

1. Put it on your webserver. I'd do it as a git clone of this, so you can update it easily, but that's up to you.
2. Create a database and run all of the queries in install/setup.sql
3. Copy include/config.default.php to include/config.php
4. Edit include/config.php to contain appropriate values.
5. Visit http://url-you-installed-it-on/admin/ and log in with the password from the config file to start using it.

If you want to upload comics through the admin interface, you need to make sure that the webserver user can write to the directory you choose for the comic files.

Customizing

The default theme is deliberately plain and utilitarian. To make a new theme, create a new directory in the themes folder, and change the theme setting in config.php to refer to it.

The bare minimum this folder must contain is a file called style.css, which will be used instead of the one in default. Any template files that aren't present in the custom theme will fall back to using the file in default.

Hopefully there are enough CSS hooks that adjusting style.css should get you fairly far without you needing to meddle with the template files.

To create a static page, make a template called page_[name-of-page].php and it will be displayed when you visit http://[url]/[name-of-page]. I'd recommend using the examples from the existing page templates as a base for static pages, as they get a lot of page-setup done for you.

Upgrading

If you follow the customization advice above, upgrading is really easy.

Just copy a new version over your old install. Your config and custom templates will be left untouched. You might need to edit your templates to take advantage of new features.

If you've made changes to the core files or the default templates, you are on your own. Read the changelogs, would be my recommendation.

If you followed my advice about git clone, just do git pull.

Todo

• Chapter navigation could be improved
• Rant commenting
• Calendar displays that you don't have to write yourself in themes