Tutorials/Storyline Dropdown

From CGWiki

Storyline Dropdowns by Phalanx

A nifty feature of Comic Genesis is that it supports those even niftier storyline dropdowns. A lot of Geners' (and even Keenspotters) never bother to learn how to use it, but it's actually quite easy (Well... a little bit harder if you're on a Mac). Here's how you do it. This is the simple basic version, and does not delve into the aditional stuff you can do with the dropdowns, but hey- it works!

1. Firstly, you need to create a new folder within your workspace folder, called 'data'
2. Next, create a .txt file (Use notepad if you're using Windows) and name it dropdown.txt. Of course you put it in the /data folder.
3. Now we come to the what to put in the dropdown.txt document itself... This is the tricky part. for the lack of a better idea, I'm using my own site as an example.
4. Most people like to have the first option in the menu to link to the main page, so the first line of the .txt file should go something like:

THE JADED HOME, /

(The first part, 'THE JADED HOME', is actually the text that appears when you click the dropdown menu. Of course you replace it with the name of your own comic. Everything that comes after the comma is actually where selecting that option will direct you to. In this case- '/' denotes up one directory and to the main page)

5. Next, you could link to your Big Calendar Archive, so:

THE JADED HOME, /
BIG CALENDAR ARCHIVE, /archive.html

(Presumably, you will have had your archives in archive.html, but anyway, just pop in whatever it is you called your archive page.)

6. Now we get on to the storylines themselves. Always nice to have a seperator, as not to confuse readers, so...

THE JADED HOME, /
BIG CALENDAR ARCHIVE, /archive.html
--------------------
STORYLINES
-------------------- 

(Because there is no comma and no values after the comma that is not there ;), these lines will not do anything and are just pretty decoration)

7. When we're done with that, we can proceed to the final part- the storylines themselves. Just name them and add the url of the comic after it.

THE JADED HOME, /
BIG CALENDAR ARCHIVE, /archive.html
--------------------
STORYLINES
--------------------
Chapter One: Four Years Late, /d/20030325.html
Outtakes I, /d/20030903.html
Chapter Two: Footfalls In The Dark, /d/20030917.html 

(The /d folder is where the comic pages are stored, by the way.)

8. And that's it. Now you can add the dropdown anywhere you like on your page using the ***storyline***tag.
9. You can also have a button set to jump to the beginning of a storyline using the ***storylinestart*** tag. You can even create a button for it by naming it storystart.gif (or any other image format) and popping it into your /images folder.
10. You can also set sub-storylines by using indentation, but as I'm supposed to keep this simple, I'm not going into that.

Now there something I must mention. MAC, LINUX and UNIX USERS! Pay attention. Because your operating system may have different ways of recording line breaks, you may have trouble with the .txt document and your dropdown skews into a horrible long line that stretches beyond the length of the page. The only way I have found to solve this in to encode the .txt in Windows/DOS format. Some text editors let you do that (Look under Preferences). If not, do just that .txt file on a windows machine, it's not that hard to find one that has Notepad on it.

And that's it. Hope you can get your storyline dropdown working, for more info, visit the Comic Genesis Help Center and other pages. Happy Webcomicking!