Upgrading Your Comments Area in WordPress 2.7

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Posted on March 5, 2009 under How To's, Wordpress

Blog Posts from Addicott Web About Wordpress

Bloggers know that commenting is vital for the long-term success of their blog, and I’m no exception to that. I’ve known that the comments area of my blog wasn’t as supportive of good commenting as it should have been, but I finally fixed that this week.

(As a quick aside, if you’re curious about why commenting is so important and what some of the benefits are for your website or blog, read through “10 Reasons Commenting is Good for Blogs” by Chris Garrett.)

Upgrading the functionality turned out to be a bigger challenge than I had anticipated. I’ve spent the better part of the last few days trying to get everything working properly and looking the way I want it to, and I’m finally done and am quite happy with the results.

I wanted to mention it here not because I want to show off my work, but because I think that pointing out the resources I used might help others as well.

What features I wanted

I’ve seen plenty of other blogs out there, so I already knew what specific functionality I wanted to incorporate into my new comments area. In particular, I wanted to add:

  • Threaded comments – Someone responds to a particular person’s comment, and it posts their reply indented within the same comment box. That way, you know which comment they were directly responding to.
  • Gravatars – Globally-recognized avatars that follow you from one blog to another. You can register a gravatar at www.gravatar.com, and then when a blog has them enabled in their comments, your gravatar will display when you comment on a post.
  • Author styling – When the author of the post responds to someone’s comment, it will be styled differently than a regular comment.
  • Separate out the trackbacks – When someone links back to your post from their website or blog, it’s called a trackback. WordPress will count it as a comment, but if you’ve ever seen blogs where the trackbacks and real comments are mixed together, the actual conversation can be hard to follow – hence the desire to separate them out.

Once I started researching how to do this, I discovered that WordPress 2.7 (the newest release of WordPress) comes with all of this functionality already built in. You don’t have to install extra plugins or hacks any longer, which is what you used to have to do. So although I was only looking to install one or two of these functions, before long I realized that I should just overhaul of the entire comments area.

I can hold my own when it comes to WordPress coding, but I’m not a web developer who really understands what everything means, so it took some time to understand what the articles I found were talking about. But once I got a grasp on it, I was able to get everything working properly and looking how I wanted it to.

Resources that helped me

There were a lot resources that were helpful to me, but these two links in particular are the best articles that I found. They both give you the exact code that you need to use. I’ve labeled each link with the page in your WordPress theme that the article gives you code for:

Follow the instructions in both of those articles and you should be able to successfully upgrade your comments area. If you have any problems, you can always Google your question or try posting it to the WordPress forums to see if someone can help you out.

Thoughts?

What do you think of the new comments area? You’ll have to leave a comment in order to see the changes! (Although I suppose you can see the comments on my article from earlier this week, “Styling Your Forms to Improve Usability” – but that would be cheating, so leave a new comment instead!)

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4 Comments

  1. Reply
    Matt Jabs wrote on March 5, 2009:

    Thanks for the link…

    I’m glad my post was helpful to you! Also, I like your blog theme, is it custom?

    Matt of eJabs.

    Posted at 1:12 pm

    • Reply
      Addicott Web wrote on March 5, 2009:

      Your post was very helpful – thanks for putting it together in the first place!

      Yes, my theme is a custom theme – glad you like it! I built it by taking some random theme that I had found and customizing it to look and function how I wanted it to. The experience of doing that is how I learned about the back-end coding of WordPress.

      Posted at 1:32 pm

  2. Reply
    Matt Jabs wrote on March 5, 2009:

    Yeah, very clean theme that is super easy to navigate. I like the pictoral links throughout as well.

    PS…I love WordPress too!

    Posted at 1:51 pm

  3. Reply
    Trackback - Free Internation Call >> How to make free international call wrote on November 19, 2009:

    ,..] http://www.addicottweb.com is one another useful source of tips on this issue,..]

    Posted at 5:00 pm

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