Comic Fury Webcomic Hosting - Layout design guide

That sounds like a neat idea.

oh and by the way

The elements designated as Global on the layout page DO NOT work on extra pages.


wrong.

It's probably the size of it, but the layout guide wont load on the extra page editing screen, so most of what's in there is either held over from the old design, somewhat edited based on the discussions before the CF2K release, and maybe a few changes I thought to make while messing around after the release. Really, though, most of it is wrong. The bit you quoted is in a section that seems to have had it's markup garbled. I should probably just take down the guide and reload it all fresh once it's all fixed.

Alright, so after its brief hiatus, the Layout Guide is finally starting to come back together. There's not a ton of stuff up on it yet, but content is starting to trickle in. At the time of writing this you can find an explanation of the element syntax, a list of a lot of Comic Fury's elements, and the simplified html for the Overall Layout. More content will be up shortly, most likely in the form of more layout sections, because they're really easy to make.

I can't shake the feeling, however, that the new guide has lost some of the clarity of the old guide. This could just be plain old paranoia on my part, but I'd really appreciate some input on what's available so far.

EDIT: I'd also like to point out that the HMTL for It Figures is almost exactly the same as the HTML for simplesville. I just changed some of the links to image, changed the order of the nav on the bottom of the comics to fix a float issue, and tweaked the navigation and the page header. So the basic layout is actually proven usable this time!

That's right. The Layout Guide is now 100% back and better than ever. I'm sure it could be even better though, so if you have any input at all, good or bad, comment, critique or advice, please let me know. Especially let me know if something is not clear.

It's a shame though... working on the guide made me think of a few things I should have suggested back when the layout syntax was still open to suggestions. Oh well :P

Here's the link to the first page of the all-new layout guide. Enjoy it and happy editing!

itfigures.thecomicseries.com/guide/

working on a help section, so this will our very first tutorial, which earns you mad credz on the streets of comicfury

Sweet. Mad street credz are always good :P

So then... that means people might actually read it and I can stop constantly plugging it? cool

maybe. Well I just got my laptop. It has windows. I found out that some of the layouts have minor problems with IE6. Ones that did not show up in the netrenderer I use.

I will fix those now.

All right, so the old layout guide never had a list of all the elements available because Comic Fury had it's own right on the layout editing page. Since CF2K doesn't have the reference up yet (as far as I can tell) I had to compile my own list of the available elements by scanning through all the default layouts. I posted this list in the new guide, but a list of the elements isn't very useful without the explanations, so I've just beefed up the guide's Element List to have to have explanations for all the elements it contains.
I can't guarantee that this list is 100% complete, as I probably missed some elements, and I know there are elements not used in any of the default layouts, but it should prove useful until the official version comes up.

ya hear that, jeff?

the official version

official version

official version

DO THE OFFICIAL VERSION DAMN IT

edit:

oh and also; the archive loop is global

I marked it as global... unless you mean the chaptered archive?

Oh, I didn't realize you differentiated between global and overall. All on overall work globally, because the overall is always present. If you're on the comicpage, the comicpage elements will work on overall as well. The system basically throws everything together and then parses it as one file, not as 3.

good to know. also, is filtering by tags for nudity and whatnot turned off, or is the lewd comic currently on the main page improperly flagged?

it does not filter on the frontpage. I'll probably add a warning icon

Alright, the official tables are done and I just have to implement them, which should be done tomorrow. Thank you jeff.

Now, I wanna use this post to talk about the future of layouts as well - we have quite some things planned.

First of all, there should be a second mode where you take a basic layout (a modified schrödinger?) or, well, multiple basic layouts, and without any HTML knowledge you can just change colors in a layout-making interface (similar to profiles on sheezyart). You will be able to change colors, the images (like the arrows) all without any HTML. This should make custom layouts more available to everyone. The complex mode will of course stay where it is.

I also want to get dropdowns with variables on the layout pages, so you just have to pick, a variable, click a button and it's in the layout. Same for simple HTML tags.

Sounds good to me. I'm more of a manual editing guy myself, but those sorts of options should help to make the comic sites a little less... same-y.

We have 10 layouts right now (well, some of them are basically all the same), and we keep getting new ones (I added a new one just now, for example, and I'm soon getting some very very beautiful layouts from a talented person who did them for another host originally), so I don't think this will be a problem in the long term.

In the long term, no.

But right now, a lot of the pre-2k sites (mine included) are sticking with Schrödinger or ...*shudder*... Rainbow Tables. Tends to make browsing between them a bit less than exciting. So yes, the easy customisation thing's a great idea.

what's with the hate on rainbow tables? Honestly I think it's just slightly better. Well actually, after the makeover I might even prefer schrödinger, but I think neither are a real layout. I can't believe those were the only ones we had for so long. I remember telling jeff to make a third one right away, and to this day we still haven't seen a single new layout from him. This is because he is a lazy lazy person. And he will probably hear this, half-heartedly complain and secretly agree.

Dammit, every time I went to make a new layout you would assign me something else (Remember those 3 frontpage designs I made?). Then once I had Cafe Template almost done you changed everything! Actually cafe template was the reason behind a lot of the new features for Cf2k. Not to mention I had to make Rob's template. I'm thinking of making something similar to robs (Changed a bit because I don't like to make stuff custom for people then re-use it later). Would that appease you?