Using WordPress as a Webcomic Archive

Okay, now that that’s all out of the way, time to get to the design. To integrate your existing site design into WordPress, you’re going to have to pull it apart just a little bit. Here’s a tutorial that really helps explain how to take an existing site and integrate it into WordPress (well, much better than I ever could explain it.) (Here’s another!)

Essentially, what you’ll be doing is taking a template page and dividing it up into three parts, a header, the body, and the footer. The header and footer are separated because they usually repeat for every page with little or no variation. For all you code novices, PHP is nice in that it can dynamically read in another PHP file to save you from needlessly copying and pasting content into every page. So your index file could look like this:

< ?php get_header(); ?>

Body content goes here

< ?php get_footer(); ?>

In WordPress, a special set of code called “The Loop” is needed in the body php file to correctly retrieve a blog post from the database. For our purposes we’ll leave this alone, but make sure to copy and paste it into where you want your comic to go on the main page. If you don’t want comments on your comics, you might want to do some research and find which line of code prints out the “comment on this post” link.

Once you get a reasonable theme working, it’s time to change the settings. Most webcomics only show one comic entry per page. In the dashboard, go to Options > Reading, and set “Show at most” to 1 posts. Also, to make your archives easy for the reader to link to, visit Options > Permalinks and under “Structure,” choose one of the preset options (if you’re feeling geeky, try writing your own.)

Again, for those who don’t want users to comment on their comics, you can aslo disable all comments through the Options > Discussion page. Up to you.

Next, we’ll get into the code that’ll automate your comics into the blog.

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