WP Comment Remix
May 28, 2008
WP Comment Remix adds a plethora of new options and features to Wordpress. From Reply and Quote links for commenters, to a full upgrade to the edit comments pages in the admin panel, WPCR will save you time and effort when running your blog.
Requirements:
Wordpress: 2.5+
mySQL: 5+ (Maybe 4.1.1+? - not tested yet)
Current Version: 1.4
Download: Download WP Comment Remix Here (From the WP Extend SVN)
Wordpress Compatibility: Tested on 2.5.x
Plugin Competition:
I entered this plugin in the Weblog Tools Collection Plugin Competition. If you like it, please vote for it here!
History:
Not much to say here, I was reading the archives at Lorelle on Wordpress, and came across her post, titled: Wanted: Wordpress Plugins For Me - I read through the post, and what she was looking for, and thought “She’s right - the WP comment system could use an upgrade”
And thus, WP Comment Remix was born
Features/Benefits:
WP Comment Remix adds a plethora of new options and features to Wordpress. These include:
For the readers
WP Comment Remix adds a number of great features that you can turn on or off, but they include:
Reply Link
You can add a Reply link to each comment, which, when clicked, adds “@OriginalPoster”, and links it to the anchor of that comment. For instance, if Steve left comment #23, and you click the reply link for that comment, WP Comment Remix automatically adds:
<a href=”#comment-23″>@Steve</a> -
to the reply box.
Quote Link
Clicking the Quote link has a similar action to the Reply link, but it adds the entire comment in a blockquote tag, including “<a href=”#comment-23″>Originally posted by Steve</a>”
Comment Ordering
You can choose how you want to order the comments for your readers - By Author name or Date, and Ascending or Descending
Separate or Remove Trackbacks
You can choose to separate the Trackbacks from the comments and move them to the bottom of the list, or remove them completely
Comment Tags
Comment tags allow your readers (and you) to find comments more easily, instead of having to read through potentially hundreds of comments in a single post to find something specific
In the admin area
WP Comment Remix also adds some awesome admin functionality for comments.
New ‘In Need Of Reply’ notifier
WPCR adds a button, similar to the “Awaiting Moderation” button that shows up on the right hand side of the Comments menu link. The new button tells you how many comments are in need of a reply, and when clicked, takes you to a list of those comments
New Links In Comment Admin Area
WPCR adds new links to each comment display: Edit, Reply, Quote, and Mark Replied
- Edit does exactly that: sends you to the edit comment page.
- Reply and Quote function much like the Reply and Quote links in the public comment area, except instead of sending you to the post page to enter your comment, WPCR simply pops up an ajax reply box where you can make your reply, then save it - all without leaving the page
- Mark Replied tells WPCR that you’re not going to reply to that comment. This makes it easy to hide comments in the “In need of reply” list if you’re not going to reply to them
Added AJAX functionality on the Manage Posts page
Now you can click on the comments image on the Manage Posts page and the comments for that post will drop down in the same window, so you can edit them right there!
Widgets
WP Comment Remix also adds 4 powerful new widgets. All of the widgets enable you to set a display template, and use similar tokens to control that template.
Recent Comments Remix
The recent comments remix widget allows you to control the look and feel of the display of recent comments. Also included is the ability to add gravatars to each recent comment displayed
Recent Trackbacks Remix
We pulled the trackbacks from the recent comments control, and put them into their own widget, so you can effectively feature both on your sidebar.
Most Active Discussions
This widget displays the most active discussions (posts with the highest comment counts) so you can wear your most popular posts like a badge of honor
Most Active Commenters
Looking for a way to honor frequent commenters? Look no further. The most active commenters widget allows you to display your blog’s top commenters proudly, as well as give them some love by linking their name to their site
Tokens
Each of the widgets is template-enabled, which means you can easily tell the widget how you want things displayed. You simply enter HTML, with one or more of the tokens below in it:
Tokens available for Recent Comments and Recent Trackbacks
- %ct - Comment title
- %cd - Comment date
- %cid - Comment ID
- %g - Gravatar
- %pt - Post title
- %pu - Post url (the permalink)
- %au - Author url
- %an - Author name
Tokens available for Most Active Discussions
- %pd - Post date
- %pt - Post title
- %pu - Post url (the permalink)
- %c - Count
Tokens available for Most Active Commenters
- %g - Gravatar
- %au - Author url
- %an - Author name
- %c - Count
Template Examples:
You use the tokens in place of data in the widget templates. For example, if you typed
<a href=’%au’>%an</a> - %c Comments
into the Most Active Commenters widget template field, it would display something like this for each commenter:
<a href=’http://pressography.com’>Jason DeVelvis</a> - 10 Comments
Installation Instructions:
- Upload
- Activate
- Go to Settings > Comment Remix and choose which features you want
Then you’re done!
Video Walkthrough
(My apologies for the poor video quality, I didn’t realize viddler would eat the video like that… I’ll get a better version up soon)
Credits
A big thank you goes to Ozh, who wrote the Absolute Comments plugin
I used some of the ideas (and a bit of code) from that plugin for the edit-comments page links & ajax reply capabilities. Make sure you check out Ozh’s site for some phenominal WP plugins!
The filterCommentsNumber, stripTrackbacks and stripComments functions in the Trackback sorter code are from Ronald Huereca’s Managing Trackbacks and Pingbacks in Your WordPress Theme post on WeblogToolsCollection.com
Known Bugs:
None
Plugin Competition:
I entered this plugin in the Weblog Tools Collection Plugin Competition. If you like it, please vote for it here!
Because this plugin/widget is provided free of charge, I simply ask you to link back to Pressography.com in a post on your blog, or from one of your sites. It doesn't need to be anything fancy - just a note saying that you're using it, and whether or not you like it. However, there is no requirement that you do this, you're free to use the plugin regardless.
todd alan on 
Jerry - SEO for Beginners on 
Robert Plank on 
Jason on 
drsuccess
Eddy De Clercq
Jeffro2pt0
Jeremy
Hi! First, thanks for what I suspect is a great plugin! I can’t really get it working, though, so I hope to get some help with two questions:
Is there any FAQ or help section to your plugin? The 250-comments-page isn’t really easy to look through for answers..
The links to edit and quote appear on my page, but nothing happens when they’re clicked. In the admin page, there’s no link to reply, quote or anything in the comment section.
Have I done anything wrong?
Hope to get some answers
Found a workaround with http://konstruktors.com/blog/wordpress/277-fixing-postpost-and-ozh-absolute-comments-plugins/
It seems that WP comment remix and Absolute Comments have problems with other plugins when they use add_action(’admin_head’,….
When you replace it with add_action(’admin_menu’,…. everything works fine.
admin_head looks rather legit to me so I don’t see why the comment plugins have troubles with it. Any ideas/suggestions?
Eddy
After finally getting my flash image uploader to work, so I could reproduce the problem with WPCR, I figured out what the problem was, and I can upload with the flash uploader with WPCR turned on!
I also fixed some other things:
- Image Uploader bug (Woo hoo!)
- XHTML compliance
- The problem with K2 and blank admin pages should be fixed (if you’re still having this problem, let me know!)
- Comment ID anchor for recent comments widget - Now you can use %cid to retrieve the comment ID, so this will give you the link to the specific comment:
<a href=”%pu#comment-%cid”>%pt</a>
Stuff that’s not fixed:
@Chris Osborne - Have you changed your admin profile lately? Or is your admin user not the initial user? Either of those things may be the culprit. I’m working on a fix that won’t require the admin user to be ID 1, but for now, that might be the problem.
This plugin won’t work with the TinyMCE Comments plugin, because the JS required by WPCR needs to access the text box with the name “Comment”, but the Tiny MCE Editor changes it, which is what renders the Reply/Quote functionality inoperable when you have Tiny MCE running. I’ll see about adding a fix, or Tiny MCE functionality altogether, but this is low on the priority list…
Current version: 1.4
I was liking this plugin, but it was disabling the media add functionality in the edit post window. That is something I use quite often to get image URLs, so it won out in the end. WP Comment Remix is currently disabled
Another thing was that MCE comments (Allowing simple Tiny MCE functionality) would not play nice with this plugin. I’d love to have the functionality of this AND the ability for people to style their comments a bit.
Hi Everyone,
I’m still trying to sort out some of these bugs - it’s really hard when I can’t reproduce them.
If anyone is getting an error notification, please copy/paste it here!
That will help a lot.
Here are some of the issues I’m working on right now:
Image uploader problem
XHTML compliance
Comment ID anchor for recent comments widget
Collision with K2
Blank admin pages
I’ll keep you updated as to how things are progressing. Thanks for all your comments!
I have found that your plugin is incompatible with K2 if you have widget support disabled against K2 embedded sidebar manager.
Version 1.3 is out! Many of the bugs have been fixed, and I added localization support (let me know if I missed anything) but I didn’t test it, as I don’t know any other languages - So if someone could test that out and let me know if it’s good to go, that’d be great!
There are still a few bugs that remain:
- Collision problem with image uploader
- Collision with AWP plugin that stops comment tags from working
- XHTML incompatibility
- SQL Error when you ignore all comments
I’ll get to those problems ASAP
@Jason - Yes, I have 1.1.
Wow, note to self: Don’t go away to a seminar and get a video review from Weblog Tools Collection at the same time…
Since there are so many comments, I’m not going to reply to them all individually. I’m just going to put it all in one comment here.
@Everyone saying there needs to be an “Ignore All” option - I agree. I can’t believe I didn’t think about it before, thanks for your thoughts! That will be the first thing I do.
@PlanetPhillip - Let me think about the tag thing. I agree that they might become unwieldy if left open for misspellings, etc. If I can find an easy answer to it, I’ll put it in
@Danny Novo and @Kerry Webster - I’m looking into the problem. It seems like something is stopping the PHP from executing correctly, and thus killing the HTML. Danny, if you could let me know what plugins you’re using, that would help tremendously!
@Jeffro2pt0 - Thanks for your kudos! It means a lot coming from a WP guru like yourself!
@Scott Tribe - Do you have “Hide Trackbacks” checked in the admin area? It will override the “Show Trackbacks after Comments” checkbox, and remove them altogether.
@Charlotte - Do you have the latest version installed? (v 1.1) It looks like the problem is with the SQL, but I checked the plugin, and the bug I see in what you pasted here isn’t in the code (at least, not anymore) - try re-downloading and re-uploading it to your server.
@Mark Eckenorde - Added to the bug list, I’ll look into it
@drsuccess - Do you have 1.1 installed? That bug should be taken care of now. If you do, let me know and I’ll look into it again to see what’s going on.
@Alistair Stewart - Which image uploader? The one from WP? Or from a plugin?
@Kate - Great ideas, I’ve added them to the to do list!
@Kevin Paquet and @ovidiu - I’ve been considering allowing threaded comments, but there are some considerations that I have to make before I can say yes or no. IE - what do I do about multiple replies (like this comment) and a few other things.
@Epat - Follow the template instructions in this post, you can use tokens to customize all of the Comment Remix widgets
@phototristan - I’ll look into it
@April Reign - Added to the bug list
@]V[orlock - I’ll check it out. Any chance you’ve been able to narrow down which plugin it’s colliding it with?
@Everyone else - Thanks for your great comments. I’m glad you like the plugin!
Known Bugs:
On In Need Of Reply link, click to different pages removes the page navigation links
Comments ending with tags messes with Reply | Quote display
- Quote link repeats after link, as well (I’m assuming this is a jQuery problem)
Collision with AWP plugin, tags not working