Manga viewer woes – Trying to find a free manga reader plugin

What happens if you have manga and want to host it online? What are your option? Well for my part, at first I tried hosting them on free filesharing sites, but the links go dead so quickly. Then I started uploading them to online manga readers, but it’s a pain going round from site to site and coping with all their rules and regulations and forms to fill. So now that I have a proper website I thought, why not add an online reader to the site? [Note: I’ve taken it down now. This an old, no longer relevant post] Little did I know that was the beginning of my woes.

First I tried a simple WordPress plugin called Kommiku. I wanted something free and simple, and Kommiku fit the bill. You enter details about your manga, upload the chapter as a zip and presto, everything online. As far as I can see it doesn’t compress the images any further either. Not that my manga was ultra-HQ or anything, but the compression on sites like Mangafox can be quite dreadful sometimes.

The problem with Kommiku? It looks horrible. It makes absolutely no attempt to adopt the user’s existing WordPress theme, and the default theme is hideous to look at. Someone who is good at PHP might be able to adapt the default theme quite easily, but if I was any good at PHP I would be writing my own viewer, right? I wholesale copied the stylesheet for my website over Kommiku’s stylesheet and ended up with the abomination you see on the right. At least it works, I guess?

Still I couldn’t past beyond the terrible look, so I tried some other plugins as well. My next foray was the Manga+Press plugin. This does seem to be integrate itself with my theme because it creates a page for every new comic. Unfortunately it seems made for people who want to publish single-page webcomics and images, not whole manga chapters. I couldn’t find the option to upload zips and I didn’t have the patience to upload page after page one after the other, so I ditched that.

There was also the WP Manga Project Manager, but first, that seems woefully outdated. It lets you offer downloads via IRC (heh) and Megaupload (heh. heh. heh.) for one thing. Secondly it’s just a manager and not a reader on its own. You’ll still have to upload your manga elsewhere and provide the link to the program. In which case it makes more sense to use the other program in the first place.

Lastly I considered a few paid plugins, but not seriously because this is just a hobby site. jtManga on Code Canyon seemed interesting and only costs $12, but I read on some forums that the developers don’t provide any meaningful support and that it’s buggy and it’s outdated. Genbu Manga Viewer from Bukku costs $9, but not from the original developer, which doesn’t offer it any more. This means I can forget about any kind of support if anything goes wrong and can forget about any future updates. No point then. The third and final one I considered was WP Manga from Xhanch, but at $200 a pop, it’s not a viable purchase for your average hobby site. Maybe if you’re MangaFox and making $20,000 a day (just a guess!) in ad revenue, spending a fraction of your gains on a plugin makes sense, but not for someone like me. Also the support is pretty poor, I hear.

My last resort will be the FoolSlide program. Problem is, that seems confusing to use. I’ll have to go into my cPanel and fiddle around with MySQL and PHP and stuff like that, which I was trying to avoid. For now you’ll have to put up with the ugly Kommiku viewer. Enjoy!

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