I will say that the Wordpress team has outdone themselves with this current release. The administrative side has completely been redone, with a much-improved system for managing media. The Write section even has tabs for adding media — images, video, music, etc. I will say that if you’re used to the old Wordpress Administrative interface, the new one will take some getting used to but you might find that you’ll like it. I already do. As for bugs, so far I haven’t found any (but I haven’t really been looking, either) and the plugins that I currently have installed work just fine with 2.5.

And, on to other things. I had seriously hoped to have the Webcomic Manager Plugin released tonight but the way its looking, that isn’t likely going to happen. I’m working on the help files that go with the plugin so anyone who uses it is able to make it work. Keep in mind that the current release is going to be a beta release so there may be some bugs that I haven’t flushed out yet.

Now, as for the comic itself. I’m working on character sheets for the individual characters now. I have Photoshop open with Kira’s character sheet loaded (its been open for the last few hours, actually ^_^;;) but Rowan and Syleth’s are done and you can view them at my Deviant Art page. I’m thinking I should have Kira’s sheet uploaded to Deviant Art within the next few hours, then I can start working on the typography for Pages 6 and 7.

For me, Spring Quarter starts tomorrow. I hope to have an update by the end of next week. I might be able to churn out a page a month afterwards but I’m not making any guarantees. 2008 was supposed to be the year that I was going to turn my life upside down; ie: get my driver’s license, a car and a new job, so we’ll have to wait and see just how much spare time I really have.

This time, I’m going to start with the comic. After about five days of rendering, what I thought was going to be one page has turned into two. So when I do update, there’s going to be two pages instead of one. As for the update itself, I’m probably going to put off till next week. I’ve been informed by my webhosting provider that there is going to be a server move this weekend so that means some intermittent downtimes. I don’t want my update to be lost in any chance downtimes, and its for that reason that if you’re interested in the Wordpress plugin, watch my DeviantArt account since I’ll be making annoucements and chances are, making it available for download on DeviantArt (since code is art ^_^). The first release will be beta and I will be asking for feedback, but I’ll save the details for when I actually release the plugin.

WP Plugin status:
I’m moving the release date up to March 30th. I’d hoped to have a release candidate out by tomorrow but really, the plugin isn’t to where I want it to be — it needs more user options regarding comic banner generation and the theme that goes with the plugin needs more work as well. Consequently, I’ve pushed the release date of the plugin to March 30th.

Comic:
I’ve started working on the comic again. I am very happy to say that I’ve got the shadow-problem worked out. The toon-shaders are really meant for the characters, and other organic objects and may even work very well on surfaces that are supposed to be metallic (with some tweaking, of course), but they don’t work well on flat surfaces, such as walls.

What is really ironic is that one of my classmates noted that the style of the comic was similar to Appleseed, which I did admit was pretty much what I was going for when I developed the shaders. Speaking of, I keep hoping to make available a MAT-pose or a Material Room package for Poser users to download but I never seem to have the time to work on it.

Soon, there’ll be an update and I’m really hoping to make this a marathon effort and try to get caught up on the pages.