Comments system

Bloke · 2010-04-26 13:33:56

johnstephens wrote:

Handling user-submitted content

An interesting proposition. Hadn’t considered that.

I’ve often wondered what would be involved in commenting on other types of data. From a tables standpoint there’s little impediment: unlike the inline custom fields, the txp_discuss table is already a separate entity (yay!) with its own parentid field which could link back to the parent item (article, file, link, image) with the simple addition of a type column to be able to distinguish where the comment was applied. A few sticking points:

the comment counts are maintained directly in the textpattern table. It’s perhaps unnecessary but certainly less expensive in terms of rendering time because they don’t need to be calculated on the fly and are only updated in the (comparatively infrequent) comment addition/deletion cycle
the comment tags only apply to articles because there’s still the “you do not have an article tag on this page” whining
there’s no such thing as a content type direct URL (aside from the category lists I added in the recent SVN)
(some of) the comment tags themselves are not actual tags, which complicates things
nesting comments is fairly easy but needs a bit of graft; wet already mentioned a solution somewhere for threaded comments, which may yet appear in TXP (there’s a plugin for it already I think)

Nothing insurmountable. But it’d need some careful thought from minds immeasurably superior to mine.

If users could configure custom fields for comments

Another great idea. So comments aren’t just limited to name/email/url/comment but could be expanded based on the site needs. Again, this is not impossible but at present more technically challenging than the first point (eeeek) :

the custom fields need to be decoupled from the article and a ‘comment’ type of CF enabled
they need their own management panel as the Advanced Prefs screen is not the right place
the comment form needs to be (a lot) more customisable than it is now — use of its container springs to mind, which I already highlighted in the OP
should there be fixed things in the discuss table, even if not required for a site (name & email for example)?
the whole issue of ‘remember’ needs to be thought through if you decide not to collect name & email, i.e. how do you determine what constitutes a repeat visit

There’s probably a whole raft of other things I’ve not considered so if anybody has any thoughts on concrete ways to achieve (even some of) this, it’s a veeeery interesting topic. Thanks for putting it forward, John.

Last edited by Bloke (2010-04-26 13:36:54)

the_ghost · 2010-04-26 17:09:31

Just thought about custom fields – we could move them to separate table, as it’s done for comments, then we could add custom_fields to every content type – article, image, files, links. For their managment there could be tab like current Content Tab

laptophobo · 2010-05-08 11:25:13

I’ve been looking through the forum about Comment Notification—is there a straight-forward way to have a user be notified when a comment is posted (other than the author of the article?) Obviously, if someone comments on an article and no-one bothers to check Comments in the Content panel (because the original author is not checking emails—which is likely) then there would be a serious administrative gaff. I followed the thread located at: http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=25941 but it appeared that the solution has yet to be had.

Anyone?

laptophobo · 2010-09-19 19:10:30

Could someone tell me where the “From” name within the email notification one gets in their email box is generated from after posting a comment?

Within the article where one posts I have “John” as author. However, in the email notification it says that the email is from “Jane.” Very strange.

Last edited by laptophobo (2010-09-19 19:11:57)

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#31 2010-04-26 13:33:56

Re: Comments system

#32 2010-04-26 17:09:31

Re: Comments system

#33 2010-05-08 11:25:13

Re: Comments system

#34 2010-09-19 19:10:30

Re: Comments system

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