WordPress Paged Comments Plugin

WordPress 2 URL fix:

Open paged-comments.php and find the ‘=== END EDITING ===’ lines. After the two lines paste the code below. In WP2 the rules for determining the requested page/post have been moved out of the .htaccess file and into PHP code. I couldn’t figure out the best way to hook into the rewrite process, so I’ve opted for a simpler approach: before WP’s parse_request kicks in, we look for the URL segment identifying the comment page, note the comment page number and strip it out of the REQUEST_URI so WP doesn’t kick up a fuss when it comes to parse the request itself. I’ve not tested this extensively, so please treat with care and report any problems. Thanks. (Still a bit rushed so not had a chance to release a new version or update the instructions.)

Note: If you’re setting this up on WP2, please disregard step 7 as it’s no longer required. (In fact, the new rewrite rule in WP2 matches pretty much any URL structure so the additional rules in step 7 won’t even be evaluated if you do include them.)

if ($paged_comments->fancy_url) {
    add_action('init', 'paged_comments_fancy_url');
}
function paged_comments_fancy_url()
{
    $req = rtrim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/');
    if (preg_match('!^(.+/)comment-page-([0-9]+)$!', $req, $match)) {
        $_GET['cp'] = $match[2];
        $req = $match[1];
    } elseif (preg_match('!^(.+/)all-comments$!', $req, $match)) {
        $_GET['cp'] = 'all';
        $req = $match[1];
    }
    $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = $req;
}

You can view the changes in the project’s trunk at the WP Plugin Repository.

Thanks for reporting back Dayna! Good to know it’s working for you. Hope it does for others as well.

Sorry for the late reply. I’ll try and answer a few of the questions…

Chris: I’ve tried to answer some of your questions on the FAQ.

If you’re still having trouble with inserting the title, it’s likely to do with the use of <?php> tags in your code snippet. Try changing

<?php if (!isset($_GET['cp'])) {
  the_content('<p>Read the rest of this entry</p>');
} else {
  echo '<p>You are browsing a page of comments on “<?php
    the_title(); ?>”. Read “<?php the_title(); ?>” <a href="',
    get_permalink(), '">here</a>.</p>';
} ?>

to

<?php if (!isset($_GET['cp'])) {
  the_content('<p>Read the rest of this entry</p>');
} else {
  echo '<p>You are browsing a page of comments on "',
  the_title('','',false), '". Read the full story <a href="',
    get_permalink(), '">here</a>.</p>';
} ?>

(The arguments to the_title() ensure the value is returned and not printed, your echo statement does that for you.)

I know you had some other questions, if you’d still like me to have a go at answering them, let me know. (This reply is quite late so you might have figured out the solution to the other problems by now.)

Tim: What you’re asking for is possible, but I don’t have the time to do it myself. Setting the comments per page value to 1 should show you one comment per page. This will also give you a URL for each comment, but these URLs won’t be very reliable as permalinks—deleting one comment will affect the page numbers and therefore the permalink. Ideally you’d want the comment ID (which currently appears as a fragment identifier of the URL) to be part of the URL as a path segment.

Dayna: Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll include an option in the next version. Here’s one solution you can use now. If your theme has a separate template file for pages (the default theme has single.php and page.php) you can edit single.php and remove the call to paged_comments_template() (to return it to the state it was in prior to step 5). This will remove paging from all posts and will bypass the Paged Comments plugin completely.

Sean: Can you provide the URL of the post with comments on. If Paged Comments is not enabled through the admin panel then everything will work as before. If you give me a URL I can check to see from the HTML source if the comments-paged.php template file is being used or not.

Vinu: I don’t have the theme packaged up, and never intended to distribute it, but feel free to use the CSS if it’s for non-commercial use.

Extra fields I think are best left to another plugin.

Kenny: Thanks for the comment. I’m not too fond of Ajax myself. The non-Ajax version will remain and if/when I get time to integrate an Ajax mode, it will fall back to non-Ajax mode when an unsupported browser is encountered. And, of course, there’ll be an option to disable Ajax completely.

The Ajax version will also only be compatible with WordPress 2. I haven’t looked into WP2 much, but as far as I know it comes bundled with Javascript libraries that plugins can make use of. If that’s the case, it’ll save me having to supply JS files and saves users time if the WP2 JS files are being shared (and loaded only once).

I’ve not had much time lately to work on the Ajax version, so I don’t think I’ll have a release ready anytime soon.

Guig, I’m afraid I don’t know. I’ve never tried popup comments. I’ll look into it when I get a chance.

Hi 082net, thanks for the work—it looks very good. I’ve included a link in the related downloads section above. I still haven’t got round to installing Trustin’s plugin, but when I do, I’ll try this as well.

Dayna: If you’re using one of the bundled templates, you should have a call to this function within the comment loop:

echo paged_comments_url('comment-'.get_comment_ID());

The function returns the ‘permalink’ URL of a comment—it’s not perfect and I’m working on a better solution for a future release. The function will also take into consideration the current comment page. So, for example, when you load this page the last comment-page is active (at the moment page 11) but the page URL doesn’t contain the /comment-page-11/ path segement. So returning ‘#comment-1911′ is not enough as someone might link to, like in your example, http://www.keyvan.net/code/paged-comments/#comment-1911 (which is only valid while comment page 11 is being loaded by default). So paged_comments_url will (at least it does for me ) return http://www.keyvan.net/code/paged-comments/comment-page-11/#comment-1911.

Please check and let me know if paged_comments_url() is being used in your comments-paged.php template. If it’s not working right I’ll have to look into it some more.

I mentioned above that I’m working on a better solution that will—if I implement it correctly —produce URLs with no reference to the comment page, somethine like: http://www.keyvan.net/code/paged-comments/comment-1911/.
I’m hoping the code can then look at the paged-comments configuration to figure out, and redirect to, the correct comment page. (Not even sure if this is the ideal solution yet!)

Tanster: I’m not too happy with the way it works at the moment (ie. having to maintain two comment templates). If you’re only after the comment numbers, you can do what Dayna suggested.

The next version will always use the comments-paged.php template while the plugin is active within WordPress. (Deactivating will revert back to comments.php.) I’m actually using the development version on this site, which only uses comments-paged.php (so when you choose ‘show all’ you’re still getting comments-paged.php). If you’re brave enough, you can load it and try it: paged-comments.php. You don’t need to make changes to your config file, but there is a new option available:

// Show-all comment ordering
// -------------------------
// Determines how comments are ordered when loaded on a single page.
// The default ascending ('ASC') order means comments will be ordered with
// the earliest comment displayed first. 'DESC' reverses this order.
// The ordering specified here is used in the following circumstances:
// 1. When a user chooses the 'Show All' option to have all comments displayed at once.
// 2. When the total number of comments has not exceeded the per_page value (ie. when
//    they're few enough to fit on a single comment page).
// In all other circumstances, the value specified in ordering is used.
$paged_comments->show_all_ordering = 'ASC';

Hope that helps.

Hi Tanster,
Sorry about that. Even the most basic maths still trips me up. I’ve corrected the code I posted earlier. Please try it and let me know if it works. (It’s looking quite ugly now—I’m sure there’s a very elegant mathematical solution out there somewhere!)

Tanster: Nice site! Glad the plugin’s finally working okay.

Dayna: Glad it’s working. Just curious, was it the URL function I mentioned, or something else?

Regarding the template file and paging. I’m still going to add your suggestion of an option to restrict paging to posts or pages. The idea behind using a single comments template is to make maintenance of the template file easier. The way the plugin works at the moment means users have to maintain two comment templates (comments.php and comments-paged.php). So to get a consistent theme you end up having to duplicate any template changes you make in one template to the other.

When I say the plugin will always use comments-paged.php in a future version, I don’t mean it’ll force paging. Just that while the plugin is active you’ll only have to worry about the one template—so, as before, you’ll still see all comments on a single page if paging isn’t enabled. I hope that makes sense. I think I’ve confused myself talking about it! (And having a template called comments-paged.php will probably cause even more confusion when this change comes into effect!) I’m open to suggestions though. If you think this is bad idea, or if you can think of something better, let me know.