Yep! I’m now releasing OtakuPro V2 for public use! I know some of you guys have been waiting for this and I’m really sorry if it took me sooo many moons to release it. My schedule is somewhat unpredictable this past few months and I’m really having a hard time doing personal stuff ^^; But yeah, finally got a bit of free time to prepare the files for everyone to use. Although OtakuPro V2 will work right out of the box, there are still some initial setup needed in order to fully utilize its features. I promised before that I’ll create some kind of an “admin page” but unfortunately, time didn’t permitted me to do so. But don’t worry, it’s easy to setup. You just need some pretty basic HTML and CSS knowledge to get it running. If you don’t know any of it, I’m very happy to help \m/

As always, OtakuPro, specifically V1 and V2 is a personal project of mine and is designed based on my personal preferences. So please don’t expect it to be like the “paid” ones where every feature set is just a few clicks away. I just feel great whenever I share something back to the otaku community – and that’s why I’m doing this. If you want like the “paid” ones, then that’s what OtakuPro V3 is for – but you don’t have to pay for it because I’ll be releasing it again for FREE in the future. And yep, OtakuPro V3 is currently being used by my site Otakumouse. If you want to learn more about V3, then head over to this page.

Alrighty then – let’s do a quick refresher of OtakuPro V2. Below is the original feature set of the framework back when I announced it in late 2012. The feature set is still the same but as I used the theme in my daily blogging, I added more and more features not mentioned in the features sheet below – like the 2nd full width post layout and dynamic embeds.

One of my added feature is a 2nd full-width layout in your post pages. You can basically set what layout to use when you’re creating your posts. The first layout is the “standard” layout and is basically composed of 2 columns. Left column will display your actual post while the right column will display additional information about your post, share options, and other stuff designed to be placed on the “sidebar”. All this information displayed on the “sidebar” is included in the “fields” when you are creating your post – such as the “figure info” section.

The 2nd layout available is the “full-width” layout which uses all the available width of the page. Again,  you can explicitly set this before you publish your post. This layout is perfect for posts containing large sets of images like figure and anime reviews.

Another thing I’ve added is the support for “multi-threaded” comments. When I first created OtakuPro V2, I decided to omit this feature since I find it ugly design wise. But I then realized how helpful it is specially if your site has lots of discussions going on. Sometimes you have to balance “design” and “usablity” to create the perfect experience for your users. OtakuPro V2 supports any number of “threads/levels” in the comment section. The default value is set to 2.

It also has some usable “class names” for typography. You can use this “classes” to accentuate a block of text or just make some of your content “pop”. It’s up to you if you want to use it.

The last feature I’ve added is the support for dynamic embeds (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.). Since OtakuPro V2 has 2 types of layouts (Standard and Full-Width), I basically made sure that any media embeds will dynamically scale based on the available width of the page. This means that your YouTube/Vimeo videos will always match the size of your content depending on the type of layout you used. Below are some in-page screenshots of this feature in action.

There are still a lot of features I didn’t mention here because honestly, I already forgot some of them =)) But yeah, the ones I talked about are the major ones that needs a bit of introduction just in case you want to use OtakuPro V2 in your personal site.

[header]Yeah Yeah… Where’s the DOWNLOAD button?[/header] As always, please just request the source files in the comment section below. You must provide your email when you’re posting a comment since this is where I’m going to send the files. Why? I wanted to know how many people are interested in using it.

[header]Where’s OtakuPro V1?[/header] OtakuPro V1 is still available. Just in case you want it, head over to this post.

[header]Can I customize OtakuPro V2? Make it white or something?[/header] Of course you can! Though you may need a bit of CSS knowledge to do so. Don’t worry since I’ll be posting a set of articles showing how to do this. One of my main goals is giving you something to “start on”. OtakuPro is designed so that you can customize it to your liking. All of my codes are documented so you won’t have any problems tweaking it. Use it however you see fit :)

[header]Who are you anyways?[/header] Just in case you wanted to know more about me. This is the perfect place to check it. And yep, I’m the proud and humbled designer of the current Culture Japan website :3 (Thanks Danny!)