WordPress Hacks » WordPress Comments

The Great Comment Debate

Alex Denning — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 23:07:31 +0000

Blogs are built around comments. It’s always fun and rewarding to see your blog have a lot of comments on it. Trouble is, comments attract spam and it’s not always easy to distinguish between legitimate comments and spam.

Here’s a scenario: your post gets popular on Delicious. You get a ton of comments from “SEO BLOG TIPS” saying “thanks for great post”. Comments like that add no value whatsoever to your blog post. Heck, they devalue it. So here’s the question: do you allow the comment or delete it?

Personally, I consider comments like that spam, but on the other hand, it does get the comment count up. So there it is. A short post, but there’s a reason for it; it’s meant to spark debate, so go on. What would you do?

Take Our Poll

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WordPress News & Notes – July 24, 2009

Alex Denning — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:51:05 +0000

These days there are so many excellent WordPress blogs and articles, it can be hard to keep up with all the brilliant WordPress articles around, so here are some great articles I’ve saved on my feed reader; feel free to add some posts you’ve found around the web in the comments.

First up, ‘10 Handy WordPress Comments Hacks‘ on Smashing Magazine by Jean-Baptiste Jung of WP Recipes fame.
Next, a post on Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr’s Digging into WordPress caught my eye: ‘Include jQuery in WordPress (the right way)‘. In this post, as you might have guessed, Chris shows how to include jQuery the right way – using the copy of jQuery built into WordPress.
Third, a post on WPWebHost in two parts – ‘Securing your WordPress Install the Foolproof Way’ – parts one and two. A couple of tips in there that you might not have thought of.
Another post that caught my eye was ‘Multiple WordPress Loops Explained‘. I would say more, but it’s pretty self explanatory.
A post that has been around a while, but is worth mentioning anyway – WPCandy presents ’10 Things You Can Do With WordPress Besides Blogging‘. Again, pretty self explanatory, but definately worth a look.
And finally, a little plug for a post I wrote the other day – ‘10 Tips to Improve Your WordPress Theme‘. Check it out. Some rather nice tips in there.

And there we have it. Six links of note! Add your own in the comments.

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Get Started with IntenseDebate

Alex Denning — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 09:00:58 +0000

WordPress’s default comment system isn’t exactly the greatest, and whilst you can improve the comment system manually, not everyone has the time or skill to do so. Thankfully, one of Automattic’s recent acquisitions, IntenseDebate can help.

Before we dive into installing IntenseDebate (which is really easy!), here is why you should use it, according to the IntenseDebate website:

So IntenseDebate is pretty much everything you could want from a comment system, so next we’re going to walk through the installation.

First thing is to go to www.intensedebate.com and signup. Next you’ll be asked to enter the URL of the site you want to install IntenseDebate on. Do so and click next. Assuming you’re running WordPress, you’ll be told you need to install the plugin:

Before you intsall the plugin, make sure you backup your database.

Once you’re backed up, follow the instructions above to step four. Once you’re at the tab, login with the account you just created, and then on the next screen click the big ‘Import Comments’ button. Sit back whilst your comments import themselves. When it is done, this screen will appear:

You’ll find a whole load of options to fiddle around with, so fiddle away, and then you’re done. Told you it way easy!

This was a guest post by Alex Denning, a WordPress power user, web design freelancer and Twitter fanatic (follow him here!). You can check out his site, Nometet.com here. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

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Collection of WordPress Comment Hacks

Kyle Eslick — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 08:00:02 +0000

There are all sorts of WordPress hacks people can easily do to customize and improve both the look and functionality of their WordPress blog, but I’ve always felt that the comments section is one of the best ways to truly customize your WordPress theme. After all, blogging is all about author interaction, and the comments go a long way towards conversations happening.

If you are looking to improve the comments field of your blog’s theme, Instant Shift recently took the time to feature a number of comment hacks, which can be viewed here. Looks like they’ve already got 30 hacks included, including a few we’ve featured here in the past.

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Warning: WordPress 2.7 Comment Pagination Creates Duplicate Content

Kyle Eslick — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 08:00:21 +0000

One of the lesser talked about features introduced in WordPress 2.7 is the new feature that breaks comments into multiple pages to create faster load times. By default, this feature is activated and set to allow 50 comments before the break. The problem is, with this new feature activated, your WordPress blog is creating duplicate content.

Here is what I found while checking my Google Webmaster Tools account for this website:

Duplicate Title Tags

Duplicate Descriptions

Is this a huge deal? Probably not, but you may want to consider unchecking this box in your Dashboard > Settings > Discussion tab. Hopefully in a future version of WordPress this will NOT be checked by default and instead be an option.

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Mourning the Loss of Co.mments

Kyle Eslick — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 08:00:16 +0000

It is with great sadness that yesterday I discovered one of my favorite services, Co.mments, is shutting down. It looks like today is the last day.

Here is the message provided by the owners:

For those unfamiliar with the service, it allows you to track follow up comments. I used it whenever I left a comment on a blog post, so now I’m not sure what service I will be using. I prefer a bookmarklet, so I’ll have to look around and see if there is anything that can accommodate me.

What do you guys use to track follow up comments?

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Give Commentators Points with CubePoints WordPress Plugin

Josh Budde — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:00:12 +0000

Are you in need of some more commentators or want to allow commentators to receive points for commenting to get something?

With the CubePoints WordPress plugin you can, CubePoints allows you to choose a certain amount of points for each comment posted by a certain commentator. You can offer premium content, allow readers to purchase merchandise or maybe even an advertisement for your blog with a certain amount of points.

When they post a comment the points set in the administration panel is added to that person’s comment account and if their comment is deleted, it automatically removes the points. You, as the administrator can even alter the points quickly and easily from administration!

If you want to display how many points a commentator has accumulated in the sidebar, you can use this code:

You can download and install this plugin from the WordPress Directory. It was just added on December 26th.

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Announce Your Comment Policy with Comment License WordPress Plugin

Josh Budde — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 08:00:22 +0000

This guest post was written by Josh Budde of josh.buddes.net, where he writes about his life, technology and blogging. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

Its been a controversy in the blogosphere for awhile now about who owns comments, although I am not getting into this in big detail, but I wanted to point out that there is a plugin that lets you let people know that your comment maybe used by the owner of the blog with attribution to you (your name and link). A blog post, posted by Jeff Chandler on Weblog Tools Collection really got a conversation going about this.

I currently am using a plugin on my blog called Comment License which will let you tell your commentators that you have a policy for posting comments. Some have made it say that no spamming is allowed, no foul language and/or that the comment maybe used in attribution by the owner. You just have to download it, upload it to the plugin directory inside WordPress, activate it and find the Comment License page; you’ll have it up and running on your blog in no time!

I’ve been using this plugin for awhile now and it still displays my comment policy right above the Submit button. If you think this plugin would be useful for your blog, go out and get it either from the WordPress Plugin Repository or Alex King’s site.

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Which Plugins Do You Want to See Built into WordPress?

Kyle Eslick — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 08:00:06 +0000

It seems like every time WordPress gets close to a new release, I praise the WordPress team for integrating popular WordPress plugins into the WordPress software and I get several of the same responses…”If it already exists a WordPress plugin, why waste time installing it into the software?”

Unfortunately, just because a WordPress plugin exists, it doesn’t mean that we aren’t better off having it built into WordPress. Here are a few reasons:

Security Vulnerabilities – Improperly coded WordPress plugins can cause security vulnerabilities. Now, this can obviously happen with the WordPress software, but it is more likely to be coded correctly or caught and fixed quickly when it is integrated into the WordPress software.
Wasting Database Resources – Poorly coded WordPress plugins can waste a lot of database resources. Unneeded database queries can cause slow loading times, etc.
Everyone Has Access – Although we all know about WordPress plugins, I’m sure there are a number of users who don’t understand what they are, how they work, how to install them, etc. Having it built into WordPress ensures that everyone has access to these features.

It is with this thought process that I always try to use as few WordPress plugins as possible on my websites, and I rejoice every time popular WordPress plugins are built directly into WordPress.

With WordPress 2.7 coming out soon, we’ll be getting a bunch of new plugins built into WordPress. What plugins would you like to see built into WordPress next? Keep in mind that the plugin would need to be something that would benefit most (if not all) WordPress users in order to be considered (not situational plugins).

The five I would like to see built into WordPress next:

All-in-One SEO Pack (or at least some parts of it) – This is very basic stuff and everyone who uses WordPress would benefit.
Google XML Sitemaps – This is one of the most popular WordPress plugins and for good reason. A sitemap.xml file should come standard with any blogging software.
No Self Pings – Why does WordPress send pingbacks internally? I think this one would be easy to integrate and people would love it.
Popularity Contest – We have recent posts, recent comments, etc. Who wouldn’t want this as an option on their WordPress theme?
Database Manager – It would be nice if there was a way that you could easily backup and restore your database without the use of a WordPress plugin.

Share your five most wanted in the comments!

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Automattic Acquires Intense Debate – Comment Improvements Coming?

Kyle Eslick — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:59:20 +0000

If you talk to most bloggers, they will tell you that comments are possibly the most important and most rewarding part of maintaining a blog, because they allow for both feedback and direct interaction with the author of blog. It looks like Automattic (the team behind WordPress) feels the same way, as they have taken a major step towards improving how comments work within WordPress with their recent acquisition of Intense Debate.

According to Matt:

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the product, Intense Debate supercharges the comment section of WordPress blogs and other sites with cool features like threading, reply by email, voting, reputation, and global profiles. There are a few companies tackling this space right now, but I was impressed with how much ID (Intense Debate) has been able to do with a small team, and happy to find that their common platform (PHP and MySQL) would make integration a lot easier.

Going forward, the plan is to keep Intense Debate available as a platform-agnostic independent service, much like Akismet. We’ll start to integrate its features into WordPress core, WordPress.com, and Gravatar as appropriate. For example, comment threading is going to be in WordPress 2.7, but reply by email is a lot easier to implement on a hosted service like WordPress.com. We’re also going to be able to lend our expertise in scaling to the ID team to make sure their users enjoy the same hassle-free speed and bulletproof availability as users of other Automattic services.

Long-term, I think that comments are the most crucial interaction point for blogs, and an area that deserves a lot of investment and innovation. Comments really haven’t changed in a decade, and it’s time to spice things up a little.

So, what does this mean for comments in WordPress? It appears that Automattic is serious about improving WordPress comments and adding additional features, so I think the WordPress community has a lot to look forward to (think of the Gravatar or BuddyPress improvements). It looks like we can also expect some of Intense Debates functionality to be built into the WordPress install at some point, hopefully as soon as WordPress 2.8 or 2.9!

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