An Experimental Life

I know I've said it before, but it bears repeating: This tutorial assumes a basic working familiarity with a base installation of Drupal, as in you should already know how to install a module, how to assign roles and permissions, how to get around the admin section, how you prefer your comment settings, etc. It assumes no knowlege beyond that, though, so even if you've never created a new content type or built a custom View, you'll be fine here.

Additional note: Do not set your comic page content type to promote to the front page by default. You're not going to use the default front page for your comic, so there is no reason to. Plus, someday you may decide to do more than one comic, or use your default front page for something else, in which case you'd have to go through and demote all your comics.

Creating your Comic content type

Go to Content Management >> Content types >> Add content type.
Let's call our new content type Comic Page, since that's what it is, and give it a good machine-readable name, as well. Say, comic_page.

Some of the modules you've installed provide additional settings, so before you save, we'll set the necessary ones. First, click on the submissions settings link to expand that section and check "Submit again?"

You'll see two new options under Workflow settings, as well. Check the boxes to enable scheduled (un)publishing and Alter published on time.

Set everything else the way you normally would, and hit save. Your new content type should show in the list now.

On the Comic page line, click on "Manage Fields" to the far right. You'll see a list of existing fields (the default ones that Drupal defines) for your Comic page content type. At the bottom of this list you'll see a place to add new fields.

Give your new field the label of Comic image, and name the filefield itself comic_image, as shown below. The most important things to remember here are to set your data type to File and your widget type to Image. Click save.

On the next page you will want to change the Permitted upload extensions. The default is txt, but you want to upload images. You can either type in gif jpg jpeg png without the preceeding periods, exactly as I have it written here (In other words, png instead of .png), or do as I do and just blank it out.

While it isn't required, you probably should do something with your comic image file path to keep your files better organized. After three years of doing BCK, I had well over 700 comics all sitting in one directory. I still haven't gotten it cleaned up.

The settings here won't kick in until you create your comic taxonomy, but setting a path now will keep you from having to jump back and forth so much. This is how I would have done it to begin with if I were starting over, and how I plan to eventually restructure. I'd use the path: [vocab-raw]/[term-raw], and possibly refine that path even further.

There are a few more options you may want to look at in the global settings section at the bottom of the page. These are pretty much up to your preference. I generally make the comic image field required for comic pages to make sure I don't space out and end up skipping a step. As for how many comic images a single page holds, that is again up to you. I generally leave it set at one. If I want to display more than one at a time, I can do that without uploading a bunch to a single page.

I set List field to disabled, and description field to enabled. I never use it, but just in case.

Once you're done here, hit save, and you'll be taken back to the field listing page. You'll see that your Comic image field type shows up there now.

Now you'll set up one last field for more control over what order the comics will be displayed. There are other ways to do this, but trust me--It will make perfect sense later.

The process is similar to adding the Comic image field. Label this field Comic for, and name it comic_for. Set the type to Text and the widget to Text field.

As always, hit save.

Optional: If you want to publish several comic pages in one day and have them stay in sequence, you may want to create one additional field, identical to the "Comic for" field you just created, but name this one Time, and make it optional. This can be useful if you are participating in 24-hour comic day. (A day when many webcomicers create and post as many comics as possible in twenty-four hours. And making them in advance is cheating.) Unless you already know you're going to do this, don't worry about it yet. You can always add the "Time" field to your content type later if you want.

On the configuration page you are sent to when you hit save, make "Comic for" a required field, even if you didn't set the Comic image field to required. Leave everything else as it is and hit save.

Arranging your fields
Use the handles to drag the fields into the order you want them to show on the page, then hit save. I generally reccommend Title, Comic for, Comic Image, Body, and while I have my own preferences for the other stuff, arrange it as you see fit. Most of this will not be visible to the user--Only to you when you upload comics.

Once you have things arranged the way you want, hit save, then click on the Display Fields tab

I prefer to hide most of my labels in the Full node view. You may even want to hide the "Comic for" field. If you let it show, each comic will say "Comic for (date)" on it. Even with it hidden, though, we can still use it to sort. You can always come back and change these later if you want.

The one thing you will want to make sure of is that you select either "image" or "image linked to node" for comic image--What's the point of uploading them if no one can see them? It's also pointless to set Full node view to Image linked to node, since in full node view they're already at the node.

Hit save. If you like, you can set the RSS, Search, and Token options here, too, but odds are the defaults will be fine for now.

Aaaaaaand, you're done creating your custom content type.