An Experimental Life

Right now you have no really good way of showing your comics. If we had clicked the box on the create content form that said "promote to front page, they'd have shown up there, but don't worry--We're gong to set things up so that they do.

Go to Administration >> Site building >> Views. You'll see a list of various views that are, as of now, grayed out and disabled. That's okay. Later on you'll want to go through the "getting started" page, but for now I'm just going to take you through the steps to build your comic view. So click "Add."

Note: Pretty much any time you change something and an "update" button appears, click it. Not save--update. Feel free to save now and again to be safe, but until you've hit the update button, clicking save won't actually save your changes. This is to streamline the process so that you're not waiting for a save at every single one of a couple of dozen steps.When you save, make sure that before you continue editing, that you select the "Display" (covered below) that you're building (as opposed to default display).

We're going to give our new view the View name of comicnav_view, the View description name of Comic Navigation View, and make sure that "Node" is selected (which it should be by default).

Now click "Next." You'll be taken to a page at which you have the option to create a new display for your view.

Page should be selected by default, but make sure of that, and click "Add display." At this point, you should see something that looks like the picture below.

As with everything else, we'll go through this step by step, so even without illustrations you should be able to follow along. Just to make things more clear, though, I've included a screen shot below with all the areas that we're going to change highlighted. Note: Make sure that "Page" display is selected while you're editing.

For a little while you'll see several errors lower down on the page, but don't worry about those. We're about to fix them.

Under "Basic settings," where it says, "Name: Page," click on "page." The field to enter your page name will appear underneath the section shown above, as will all the other settings options and fields we'll go through. (Now that you know this, and given the highlighted page above, I don't think we need an illustration for every single field and setting.)

Change "Page" to whatever you want and hit "Update." For my comic, I called it BCK main page. This is only to help you make sure you're choosing the right display in the admin interface.

Where it says "Title: None," It's up to you what you want to do. If you set a title, say your comic name, it will show on all your comic pages. Go ahead and change it if you think you might want that. You can always change it back later if you don't like the way it looks. If you do change it, remember to hit Update.

Note: For many settings, the Update button will read "Update default display," or "Add,"(Which I'll just call Update for brevity), and another button will appear to the upper left of the settings fields section that says, "Override." Don't touch the "Override" button while we're doing this--Just use the Update button.

Now click up above where it says, "Items to display: 10." Scroll down again until you see something like the picture below. Change the 10 to 1. This will set things up so that your comics will display one to a page. Hit Update. Remember, we're not worried about any errors we see yet.

Now go to Page Settings, and where it says, "Path: None," click None and enter a path in the field that appears below. Change it to something like, view/mycomicname (with the actual name of your comic in place of "yourcomicname." No spaces, no starting or trailing slashes, and in all lower case. If it's a long name, truncate it.)

Click on "Menu: No menu." Using the fields and radio buttons that appear below, set this up as a normal menu item with your comic name for the title (or if you like, just put "comic" if you're only running one comic on your site). Description is optional. Anything you enter in Description will pop up when someone hovers over the link. Choose Primary Links in the dropdown, since you'll probably want the link to your comic at the top of the page. You can set the menu item weight either here, or do it later through the normal menu administration page.

Notice that we've skipped over "Row style: Fields," under Basic Settings, even though I have it highlighted above. This is intentional. We'll deal with it later.

Now in the center column where it says Fields, click the plus sign. Note: Remember that this is not the same as "Row Style: Fields" under Basic Settings in the first column.

From the dropdown menu that appears, select "Content: Comic image (field_comic_image)." We're going to change this later for reasons I'll explain when it's time to do so. When you hit update here, you will see come configuration options. Go down to "Format," select "Image," and hit update again.