big problem
Hey ya’ll, just a heads up that I strongly suspect (but can’t 100% confirm) the plugin I’ve been using for around 12 years to run the site via WordPress (Comic Easel) is now deprecated with newer versions of php (8.0 or later), which is bad because I will no longer be able to securely update the site. There’s no real word or updates from the developer as far as I can tell, so I will probably have to look for a different plugin or re-do the site entirely at some point, which I am not a huge fan of. If anyone else savvy has any suggestions I’d love to hear them. This will probably be an ongoing process.
My options are A. find a different plugin of which there appears to be (1), B. write my own, which I have no technical expertise in, C. re-do the site entirely and migrate all its content over, which would be a phenomenal undertaking. Not a huge fan of any of these tbh but probably don’t have a choice.
Update: an enterprising good samaritan seems to have made a github fix so let’s see how we do
A variation of option (B) could be “Fix Comic Easel”. Modifying WordPress plugins is not typically very much fun at all, but it is likely doable to update Comic Easel to be PHP 8 compatible. It’s released under a GPL license and is on Github, so someone *with* the technical expertise could fork it and try to put together the fix without needing to do anything hinky or underhanded. It’s easier than writing your own from scratch or re-doing the site entirely at least.
Looks like they released their last update 8 months ago, and PHP 8 has been out for years, so either they didn’t know or they didn’t prioritize whatever you’re running into.
I wonder if you could point Claude Code or Codex at the issue, point it at the github repo described above and have it do the majority of the legwork for you.
It’s probably a simple fix so I can’t imagine it would be hard to do by hand, but yeah it looks like someone already did what you said. There’s an open PR. Looks fine to me. Only a few little syntax changes
That was me with the PR, comment still awaiting moderation (probably because it contained some links).
The version that used to be distributed by wordpress was de-listed for vulnerabilities, and even though the github repo was fixed, it was never re-listed. So Tom might be using the old wordpress-distributed 1.15, not the github version 1.16.
And it just got merged. That was fast!
Maintaining legacy codebase is the perfect job for LLM.
I’m not sure what problems you are having with Comic Easel, but if you have any questions or concerns about your site I might be able to help as I work with legacy php daily. There should definitely be easy and secure solutions for your problems (whether you need a wordpress plugin or something different). But when calling out to the public be sure to be safe. Feel free to contact me even if you want a second set of eyes for a solution you feel unsure about.
Hey, I’m the solutions architect for a small shop that does WordPress implementations, and we’re a huge fan of the comics. If you want to bounce ideas around, happy to chat any time.
I wish I could help. Best of luck!
avwolf is on the same track as I am / would be. I do WordPress related stuff for a living, I’d be happy to help out, honestly least I could do for a comic I love so dearly, beyond the Patreon sub ofc
It looks like the developer is working on it: https://github.com/Frumph/comic-easel/pull/36
Possibly in response to your post here, it looks like Comic Easel may now have been updated for PHP 8? https://github.com/Frumph/comic-easel
hi,
you might want to contact the Puck webcomics author who had exactly the same problem with the same plugin : here is their post on this subject https://puckcomics.com/new-site-same-old-puck/
good luck