WPTavern has this cool thing where, without threaded comments, you still have a reply link, AND it creates an automatic link back to the original comment.
Let me rewind. If you have threaded comments, then you get a ‘reply’ link on the bottom of a comment, and it lets you make a threaded reply. Yay! There are problems with this, though, as after a while, if you get nested deep enough, you can’t reply under anymore, and have to go up to click reply on the previous post and on and on.
Back eons ago, WPTavern solved this with a function, and like all great sites documented it! The problem? The documentation was busted. Now, yes, I did ping Jeff about this and asked him how it went, but in the meantime, I was impatient and looked up a plugin that almost fit my bill.
Enter @ Reply (aka Reply To), which add in a reply link to all comments! Plus is gives you ‘Twitter like’ @replies, so when you comment, it starts “@foo:” automatically. This is just like what WPTavern has, perfect! Except… not quite.
My problems became two:
- I want all comments to have a ‘reply’ link.
- I don’t want the hover over image.
And I solved this with two code chunks: a plugin and a theme.
See, by default WP stops showing you the ‘reply’ link when you can’t nest anymore. To change that, you have to edit how your theme calls comments. Or rather, you have to change the comment_reply_link() call.
The Theme Code
I’m already customizing my comments in Genesis so this was surprisingly simple.
What was this:
<div class="comment-reply">
<?php comment_reply_link( array_merge( $args, array( 'depth' => $depth, 'max_depth' => $args['max_depth'] ) ) ); ?>
</div>
Becomes this:
<div class="comment-reply">
<?php comment_reply_link( array_merge( $args, array( 'depth' => 1, 'max_depth' => 2 ) ) ); ?>
</div>
Basically we’re lying to WP and saying we always show the link. I got that idea from this stackexchange post, and as I understand it, we’re tricking WP by saying that every post is depth of 1, and has a max of 2, instead of letting it figure it out on it’s own. This is probably inelegant, but I couldn’t find another way to have the reply link always on.
The Plugin Code
This was easier, in that I took the existing code, cleaned it up and removed the reply image, and that was pretty much it. Downside is that this does not work on every site. Notably, it doesn’t work unless threaded comments are turned on. When they’re not, it does a double-refresh.
That said, this is probably never going to be a plugin for the masses, so I’m content with having it work this way for me. Even if I only thread one comment at a time, it would let me group them together and get the @-reply. It’s already rather popular on the site I intended it for, and people like it.
So here’s the code:
class AtReplyTwoHELF {
public function __construct() {
add_action( 'init', array( &$this, 'init' ) );
}
public function init() {
if (!is_admin()) {
add_action('comment_form', array( $this, 'r2_reply_js'));
add_filter('comment_reply_link', array( $this,'r2_reply'));
}
}
public function r2_reply_js() {
?>
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
function r2_replyTwo(commentID, author) {
var inReplyTo = '@<a href="' + commentID + '">' + author + '<\/a>: ';
var myField;
if (document.getElementById('comment') && document.getElementById('comment').type == 'textarea') {
myField = document.getElementById('comment');
} else {
return false;
}
if (document.selection) {
myField.focus();
sel = document.selection.createRange();
sel.text = inReplyTo;
myField.focus();
}
else if (myField.selectionStart || myField.selectionStart == '0') {
var startPos = myField.selectionStart;
var endPos = myField.selectionEnd;
var cursorPos = endPos;
myField.value = myField.value.substring(0, startPos) + inReplyTo + myField.value.substring(endPos, myField.value.length);
cursorPos += inReplyTo.length;
myField.focus();
myField.selectionStart = cursorPos;
myField.selectionEnd = cursorPos;
}
else {
myField.value += inReplyTo;
myField.focus();
}
}
//]]>
</script>
<?php
}
public function r2_reply($reply_link) {
$comment_ID = '#comment-' . get_comment_ID();
$comment_author = esc_html(get_comment_author());
$r2_reply_link = 'onclick=\'return r2_replyTwo("' . $comment_ID . '", "' . $comment_author . '"),';
return str_replace("onclick='return", "$r2_reply_link", $reply_link);
}
}
new AtReplyTwoHELF();
Most of the javascript stuff is copy/pasta for me (just left of witchcraft), and I left it barebones (no configurations) on purpose. Simple is as simple does.
Suggestions and tweaks welcome!
This was straightforward. Follow their directions and it’s fine. I went for free, and fiddled with my Security Settings a lot. I hate captcha. And I know, I knooooow, the users for this site will cry if they get hit by one, so I turned my security to “Essentially Off” – This is the only way to get rid of Captcha. Sad panda. I also turned “Browser integrity check” on for now.
What is static that I can and should cache? JS, CSS, font files, images. What is not static? Blog posts, comments that are happening all the time, fast and furious. A gallery that needs to update. A wiki that has a deadline. Worst of all, it prevented two of my apps from being able to make their own ‘static’ cache in the background. Now really that means I shouldn’t have to make my static cache at all, but this brought up another issue. Coordinated pushes of content, where four separate apps update 1-3 pages each at the same time means I need to be able to purge those pages, right away. And right now, there aren’t extensions to do that.
There is a difference between gatekeeping and censoring. If I make a political agenda post about a hot-button topic, and then proceed to delete all replies that promote the opposition, am I gatekeeping or censoring? What about when I delete (or edit) comments left by people who are insulting? Is that inherently wrong? Where’s the line between “I don’t like it” and “I’m offended by it”?
That was all fine and dandy for me but I’m not the master of the universe like that. Well, not all the time. I had people to input data for me! They were going to have to manually take the forms (Word Docs), filled in by non-techs, and copy the data into the right places in the app. And you want me to tell them they have to fix this for the non-techs? I thought about how much time that would take, and decided the best fix was to change the forms! Right?
I call myself a software socialist because I strongly believe in giving back to the things that make me successful.(This is, in no way, a blanket approval of everything Socalist. Snarky political comments may be deleted.) This is why I give back to WordPress, spend so much time on it, and so on and so forth. Thus, it’s logical (or at least internally consistant) when I say that the part about WordPress that I hate is people who take and never reciprocate. More than this just being a pet peeve, though, people who do this with Open Source code are biting the hands that feed them, and it’s terribly frustrating to watch.
But if I don’t give back code, do I annoy myself? Nope! Much like WordPress has a