Layouts 101: Creating a Web Comics theme with v013 (part 1)

tips & tricks
1

This is the start of a series of posts that will give a large example of theming in Hugo. The theme is for a web comic site and will show off some of the new features in version 13.

The functionality for the theme is straight forward. It will support both “strip of the day” (a collection of images that don’t need to be viewed in any particular order), single series (one story with multiple pages that should be read in sequence) and multiple series (a site with multiple stories (such as Looking For Group http://www.lfg.co/page/853/)).

The theme will have the “typical” layout containing a customizable banner and navigation to move between pages (and stories if needed).

For strips and single series, the home page will show the current page. For a site with multiple series, the home page will have links to the current page of each of the series.

The theme will also support comments via Discourse.

2

I’m currently looking for a web comics theme, and found this entry via google. Was this abandoned, or was the discussion taken offsite?

3

Looking for the same thing. Closest I have found was this theme for Jekyll https://github.com/chrisanthropic/comical-jekyll-theme

4

Actually it’s pretty simple to make a web comic with Hugo.

Arguably the hardest part is generating the links for the first and most recent page of the comic but this question was answered a while back over here: [SOLVED] Get the first and last post in a section (date-based)

The rest, like the comic (posts) archive and the next/prev navigation are well documented.

5

Not long ago I added a website to the showcase section whose main content are comics. Maybe the theme fits your needs.

1 Like
6

I’ve started using Wordpress with Comic Easel http://comiceasel.com/. To keep it static I use the Simply Static addon https://de.wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/, then upload it to my webserver.

7

Sorry for the late reply. I put this aside because I thought that working with data files would be a good approach to handling images with different sizes. But that required a build pipeline to get the image size out and that required some research and so on. I’ll dig out what I started and update it for the new versions.

8

Have you considered http://cloudinary.com/

You can automate image sizes etc via their service.