Commenter Thread

Comments on Site Experiment by Michael Cain

Question: How do you insert line breaks into a comment without causing it to post?

You can't just hit enter?

This is great, as an add-on not as a replacement, which is what I assume was the intention? Does this now happen automatically, or does someone have to do things to it intermittently?

It's a very non-traditional add-on, intended to let someone get a feel for what's going on. State of the Discussion, not the discussion itself. CK MacLeod, the original author, figured out how to organize a lot of information into a little space. To be honest, despite the links back to the real pages, it tempts someone to jump straight to comments w/o reading the post proper first. That's a potentially serious downside. There's a widget version of the code that might be better, added at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar.

Every invocation generates a new page that's up-to-date. Speaking broadly, it doesn't require any attention except sometimes following a WordPress or PHP update. I got involved at the other site where it runs after cumulative updates had broken it completely.

Thanks, Charles. As I've mentioned, I inherited this when it was orphaned by the original author. I've kept it running, but have never been through it systematically to clean up. I know there's a bunch of CSS that only applies when the widget (as opposed to page) version is run, and I suspect there's some CSS that's just dead. Once I get past the holidays, I'll apply these corrections and I also intend to address lj's complaint about the comment excerpts.

ETA: And it doesn't come anywhere close to the current practices for things that ought to be included in plugins.

And just an observation about italics.

The WordPress built-in get_comment_excerpt() strips out formatting tags. The SotD code I inherited has its own comment excerpt code, and also strips out formatting tags unless the excerpt is the entire comment. That's what happened in the middle comment in your picture.