Webcomic archive template not working

I’m having exactly the same problem while attempting to set up a multiple-comic site. Did you figure this out?

I’m trying to create a front page for the comic that will appear at a sub-URL, but I get “It looks like Webcomic is not installed or activated. This template will not affect the appearance of this page.” instead of the expected options.

Sadly, I have yet to figure this out. I’ve almost started considering doing an archive page manually (writing links for each of the pages one by one) so that I don’t have to deal with this issue.

For an archive page, if you don’t need any additional layout or features, can’t you just link to the archive URL you configured in the settings and have one auto-generated for you? (Although from the looks of it, by default, the layout of that page is pretty poor, and also seems to be pulling the number of items per page from the post settings, which results in very awkward navigation if you only display a couple of news posts per page; maybe there are more configuration options I’m not seeing.)

In any case, I’m wondering if this is a widespread bug or if it’s specific to my install–do you have any other plugins installed, or have you done anything unusual like moved your site to a different domain or something?

Ordinarily, I’d try disabling and re-enabling the misbehaving plugin, but I’m terrified this will break something with the existing archive when it gets disabled–I have no idea how smoothly Webcomic turns off and on (obviously with the “delete webcomic data when the plugin is deactivated unchecked, or of course it won’t work).

You haven’t by any chance tried disabling and re-enabling Webcomic, have you? Maybe you’re brave enough to try?

I haven’t pinned down the solution quite yet, but I figured out what’s causing this.

I have a custom child theme of Inkblot, but with that active it’s failing to recognize that Webcomic is installed when you’re in the Page editor. Switching the “active” theme back to the default Inkblot kicks it back in.

Interestingly, since a child theme can override the site-wide theme setting if you select it as the default for the particular comic, you can set stock Inkblot as the main site theme but still have a child theme active for your comic.

I expect there’s a way (probably an easy one) to make the check work with a child theme as well, but I haven’t spent enough time looking into it to come up with the answer. I’ll post if and when I do, unless someone else figures it out first.

Small correction on what I just said: If you have a different child theme set for an individual webcomic collection but default Inkblot selected for the main site, even though the Admin interface will show you the options now, they don’t actually work on the page when it’s displayed.

That is, setting Inkblot active in the Appearance section, but a child theme of Inkblot as the default for collection webcomic1, will result in you seeing the options in the Pages interface rather than the “not installed” error, but when the page is generated it just doesn’t work (in fact, it doesn’t even insert any text for the page itself, in addition to failing to add the generated comic content–the page is just blank).

Again, I’m sure its as easy as modifying the child theme to connect the Webcomic-active-detect code, I just haven’t figured out what that involves.

Okay, mostly figured it out. Turned out the problem (at least in my case) was simply that my child theme had “Webcomic: 4.3.0” in the CSS header, which though technically accurate was too specific. Setting it to “Webcomic: 4” kicked it in and caused it to function properly; I turned up an old thread on the source bug tracker discussing this issue exactly. (I would assume the same thing would happen if you have no “Webcomic: ” in the header, or an old version number.)

Turning on the “integrate automatically” checkbox will apparently also work, but that may have unintended consequences and shouldn’t be necessary.

I’m having a different problem now; although I can select “Homepage” and it works, it refuses to let me select “latest”–if I do so and save, it reverts to “first”, and that’s what I get.

That’s frustrating, and appears to be a bug. Now to find a workaround for that…

To clarify: you should (as MWMarshall discovered) always include the Webcomic: X.Y.Z in your theme style.css file – even in Inkblot child themes – and it’s best to use the exact version string of the lowest version of Webcomic the theme is compatible with. 4.3.0 didn’t work because of how PHP’s version_compare function compares version strings: 4.3 is technically less than 4.3.0 when using version_compare (they really should be equivalent, but version_compare doesn’t treat them that way).

The Homepage template issue appears to be an Inkblot bug. I’ve filed an issue for it, and will probably have it fixed soon (no telling when it’ll show up in the Theme Directory, though, because of the theme review queue).

I’ve pushed a fix for the Webcomic Homepage template issue to the master Inkblot repo on GitHub.

Wait, okay. This is a lot to take in. I’m running an inkblot child theme which I created by following some standard wordpress tutorial from youtube, so I had no idea that anything about webcomic should be written into the style.css file. Where in the file should I add that information? Would something like this work?

/*
Theme Name: -
Theme URI: -
Description: This is a child theme of inkblot
Author: -
Author URI: -
Template: inkblot
Version: 1.0.0
Webcomic: 4.3
*/

The last line there, where it says “Webcomic: 4.3” is what we’re talking about. So yes, if you’re running Webcomic 4.3, it should work.

Of course, if you are the only one using the child theme, and you know for a fact that it works with your version of Webcomic, you can safely fudge a lower number (like the “4” I put in) without any real danger.

@mike — Thank you very much for chiming in with the explanation and assistance, as well as the very quick response on the Inkblot bug. It’s greatly appreciated, as is your work on Webcomic itself.

I see, thank you! I’ll try it as soon as I can!