Hi hari,

You want to read this thread: [url=http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=10233][Plugin] Sticky Announcements[/url] very carefully for an answer to your question.

Good luck

Just to distinguish my need from the "Sticky Announcement" kind of plugin, I want to do this

1. Not involving Multiple blogs
2. To automatically update the sticky post with the latest post in that category without any editing on my part.
3. Not double display the sticky topic in the main page if it is the latest topic in any case.

EDIT: Afwas, I read that topic, but I'm not sure if that's the kind of plugin that would work.

P.S. In the worst case scenario, I could use the "Free HTML" widget and put it in a container and display the latest toon image there and update it whenever a new one is posted, but that would be the last option.

Somewhere around here there is a post that talks about creating a new post-type then making the blog display that post type first. I *think* you could adopt that to do what you want with a little bit of effort on your part. For example make a post-type called 'toon' and make it be first. Then each time you post a cartoon make sure IT is of the post-type 'toon' AND edit the previous cartoon to be a regular post-type 'post'.

Search for keywords that dance around this topic with the user name "Yabba" and you should be able to find it. Stuff like "sticky" and "post-type" or "post type" should start getting you to it.

Good luck with it!

EdB wrote:

Somewhere around here there is a post that talks about creating a new post-type then making the blog display that post type first.

Search for keywords that dance around this topic with the user name "Yabba" and you should be able to find it. Stuff like "sticky" and "post-type" or "post type" should start getting you to it.

Good luck with it!

Afwas wrote:

You want to read this thread: [url=http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=10233][Plugin] Sticky Announcements[/url] very carefully for an answer to your question.

Good luck

Ah ... no, but close. Yabba's method is mentioned in there, but the post doesn't focus on what I understand harishankar to be looking for. Try http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=14080 and see if that is any good for you. Still would be editing on your part (the previous post) but not editing files.

* I think I should play with that bit of code to see what other exciting places it can take me. I don't play enough with the new features :(

Thanks EdB. I'll look for that. The only thing that concerns me about that method of creating a new "post-type":

1. If I mark several posts as "post type" then will they all be displayed first and only then the normal posts? That's not what I'm looking for.

2. Is it a possibility to merely edit the template file instead of index.php to achieve this effect?

I try not to edit the core files as much as possible. If it could be done using the index.main.php template file, it might be a better idea.

I've rejected the method of using a Free HTML widget because it would display that bit of code in *every* page/even single articles, not just the blog home page. I want this to be restricted ot the blog home page.

Yabba's method requires NO core file edits. A stub file, but not a core hack (unless you don't want stub files). And yeah you would have to edit your posts so that you only had one with that particular post type. AFAIK this is the closest available to what you seek. I'm pretty sure that one could rather easily figure out a way to make only one of the new post types show up, but one would have to be pretty smart with this stuff to "easily" get it done ;)

Something like this in your skins/your_skin/_whatever.whatever.php file(s):

1- all the stuff that gets ready for the posts loop
2- a posts loop that uses new-post-type and datemodified (like yabba shows) AND only allows one post with a "posts limit 1" stuck in there somehow
3- the regular everyday normal posts loop.
4- all the stuff that happens after the posts loop

The exact file to stick it in depends on how your skin is built so I've no idea what it would be. The shiny new 'custom' skin uses only one file, 'evopress' uses 7, and my version of evopress uses 16. So knowing exactly what the file(s) you would need to examine for where to do this change, assuming this can even be worked, is impossible to predict. Having said that, if you can duplicate the posts loop to go by the new post type and date modified AND limit it to only one post, then you can have all your toons with the new post type and not have to suffer more than one toon per multi-post page.

How you handle single post pages would be up to you and your skin of course.

And you might have an issue with toons showing up in their normal chronological sequence in the second traditional posts loop, but that too could be logically overcome.

* I really should play with these new features a bit instead of teaching php and javascript to work together so I can have a stupid setting for my stupid commenttags plugin, but such is life.

Ed, thanks for the detailed explanation.

WordPress has a skin/template that is optimized for comic driven sites/blogs, where the primary content is comics.

Take a look at this for instance
http://www.pcweenies.net/ uses the comicpress theme

http://mindfaucet.com/comicpress/

Might be one of the designers here could create a theme suited for that!

I have quite a few wordpress-powered comics in my aggregator :D

Didn't know it was due to a cool trick they do though.

By the way, if you've read my webcomic I'd love your opinion of it as well. ;)

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php is my second favorite online comic right now. http://xkcd.com/ is tops.

So! I've been thinking about this a bit. Not always a good idea, but what the heck. I think using a flavor of multiblogs is the way to go, with the comics blog placed above the regular blog and set to one post per page. I've also hacked up a way to use the "Make posts" button create drafts so that you could upload and 'post' a couple of comics then date them in the future before actually publishing them.

Your thoughts on this approach? Like especially what skin would you start with to build a comics skin out of? evopress is so played out it's sad, but it already exists in a sidebar/no sidebar split, which would be usefull for not wasting space next to the comic. OTOH custom can be tweaked into anything with relative ease...

BTW I sorta like comics that link the current page to the next page although that would be a bit tricky to code in ... I think. Your thoughts on that aspect, or is a prev/next type of thing perfectly suitable?

Ed, I agree that a multi-blog is an ideal way to solve this situation.

The hard part for me is moving my comics to a separate blog. Sure enough, it's easy to move categories to a new blog, but then what about the permalinks to the existing comics? They all get destroyed. So a multiblog solution, while nice for new websites, might not work too well for me personally.

I think the skin does not really matter. I think you could start off with any skin because I would customize it anyway. Also I like the idea of a "Next page"/"Prev page" in a webcomic as it adds to the navigation functionality.

I think the whole idea would require a radical redesign of my current blog whichever way I look at it.

I am even thinking of writing my own simple CMS tool which is optimized for comics displaying, but that's only as a last resort as writing any PHP code is way too time-consuming.

harishankar wrote:

Ed, I agree that a multi-blog is an ideal way to solve this situation.

The hard part for me is moving my comics to a separate blog. Sure enough, it's easy to move categories to a new blog, but then what about the permalinks to the existing comics? They all get destroyed. So a multiblog solution, while nice for new websites, might not work too well for me personally.

Nope, depending on what your permalinks are structured like, but in general no they don't get destroyed. But I'm sure it depends partially on exactly what your permalinks look like now. My permalinks are stubfile/year/month/day/title. I'll enable cross posting across blogs, move a post to a different blog, and see if the old permalink still works.

harishankar wrote:

I think the skin does not really matter. I think you could start off with any skin because I would customize it anyway. Also I like the idea of a "Next page"/"Prev page" in a webcomic as it adds to the navigation functionality.

Sure it does. How else can one create something without a starting point ;)

harishankar wrote:

I think the whole idea would require a radical redesign of my current blog whichever way I look at it.

Where is your blog by the way?

BTW I have a fully functional skin that does this. 2 blogs, one of which has only one category and is used for images. The other puts posts under the image. Not the most optimal solution, but as a proof of concept it works.

Okay cool. I just moved a post from a category in blog #1 to a different category in blog #9. The original permalink managed to redirect to the new location, so in my setup that much is good to go. Might not be true for all cases, but there is a fair amount of code in b2evo that tries to figure out where a link is pointing to if it doesn't find it immediately based on the URL.

Now to move it back where it belongs ;)

I'll test that offline, EdB.

My blog URL is http://hari.literaryforums.org

By the way, if you like my webcomics, do let me know! :D