WordPress Paged Comments Plugin
Paged Comments is a plugin for WordPress to allow comment paging. Useful for those popular blog entries receiving many comments, or a simple guestbook page within WordPress.
Features
- Comment ordering: show latest comments first, or last
- Specify number of comments to display per page
- Enable paging for all posts and pages, or on a per-post basis
- Give users the choice to view all comments on one page with a ’show all’ link
- Specify the first or last page of comments to load by default
- See paged-comments-config-sample.php for more
Download — Latest Version
- Version 2.7.1 (2008-07-14) (zip file) Release Notes
- View code at the WP Plugin Repository
- Work in progress: Ajax-style Paged Comments (no download yet - AJAX support coming in version 3)
Related Downloads
Installation for WordPress 2.5
If you’re upgrading from a previous version, skip these installation steps and read the upgrade steps.
- Download and extract plugin files to a folder locally.
- Read through and edit paged-comments-config-sample.php to configure, then save the file as paged-comments-config.php.
- Upload the whole paged-comments directory to /wp-content/plugins/. The plugin files should now be in /wp-content/plugins/paged-comments/.
- Enable the plugin through the WordPress admin interface. That’s it!
Optional Steps
- To customise the template to work better with your theme: Open the plugin’s themes folder and find the subfolder corresponding to the WordPress theme you’d like paged comments enabled on (or if your theme isn’t listed, choose the ‘default’ folder). Upload comments-paged.php to the appropriate WordPress theme folder (found in [wordpress]/wp-content/themes/).
For example, if you’re using the default WordPress theme, copy [paged-comments-plugin]/themes/default/comments-paged.php to [wordpress]/wp-content/themes/default/. (The plugin always tries to load comments-paged.php from your active theme folder first.)
Make any modifications to comments-paged.php. The file is based on the comments.php file, so if your theme is very different it might be easier to copy in the necessary elements from paged-comments.php. View the diff report to see what you need to change.
Examples of Use
The comments on this page are handled by the plugin, but it’s also used by the following sites:
- White Town guestbook
- Thank You Stephen Colbert (over 60,000 comments!)
- Playstation
- eBay
- Mashable
- TorrentFreak
Questions?
- Read the FAQ and if it’s not answered…
- Leave a comment or email: keyvan (at) k1m.com
Donate
I work on this plugin in my spare time. If you find it useful, please consider donating to help me continue work on the plugin. (This plugin is, and will remain, free software, please only donate if you want to.)
Paid Support
If you run a commercial site and you’re having difficulty setting up paged comments, I now offer paid support. Feel free to get in touch: keyvan (at) k1m.com
It works perfectly, thanks so much.
Steve, the new version is now available. I had so much on I couldn’t get it done sooner. You can either download the new paged-comments.php file (making sure you copy over your current configuration) or copy and paste the minor changes into your existing paged-comments.php file.
If you do get a chance to try it, let me know if it works okay. Thanks.
The mob has spoken!
Thanks so much for addressing this Keyvan, I look forward to the new version.
Steve, this issue has already been raised. I responded saying I’d try and include an option to enable the alternate behaviour. Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance yet, but as it’s now the single most requested feature (2 requests!)
I’ll try to release something in the next few days.
Problem:
I have my comments set to descending order. The problem with this is if I have 8 total comments, page 1 will have 3 comments, and page 2 will have 5.
Is it possible to have an option (or hack) to reverse this? So that page 1 of comments will always be full (5) and page 2 will have 3 comments, and back fill from there?
Thank you SO MUCH for this plugin! It worked perfectly, and was a breeze to modify to fit my template. You can see it in action here:
http://www.automatorworld.com/?p=56
Nice plugin. Thanks!
Thanks! That works perfectly, and was VERY easy to do. Other suggestions I have seen were much more complicated.
I have another question: I don’t need visitors to enter their Website, but I would like them to enter their student ID number (this is a site for university students). Is it possible for users to enter their ID number into the Website field, and then make that field required?
Gio, sorry for the late reply. I’m afraid I don’t know why you’re having problems with fancy URL enabled. You should only be getting 404 if the rewrite rules aren’t working, but you say the WP generated rules are working. Have you checked to make sure WP isn’t overwriting the plugin’s rules you’ve manually added when it’s updating the htaccess file?
Snoogly, I’m sure there must be an easier way to do this (maybe even through the admin interface), but here’s one solution: Open the comments-paged.php template file you’re using and remove the PHP code from the value attribute of the input elements. (I’ve highlighted the relevant code to remove from the snippet below.)