Hikari Featured Comments

Have you ever wanted to highlight a valuable comment among all others? Or not let that troll 6-paragraphs comment take more space than it deserve? Or even hide a whole thread of offtipics?

 

Well, now you can!

 

 

Hikari Featured Comments is a simple plugin that adds 3 new custom fields to comments, allowing you to add special properties to each of them.

 

With this feature available, you can query any comment to know if it has any of those properties flagged, and if so you can take special actions within your theme or another plugin.

 

 

 

Features

 

There are 3 special properties available, you can give them any semantic you like, but default meanings are as follows:

• Featured: a comment flagged as featured should be highlighted from all others. You can give it special CSS styles from your theme to make it more visible among all comments, and flag any valuable comment as so.
• Buried: a buried comment is a comment you don't wanna just delete, but also don't want it as visible as all others. You can use it to hide offtopic comments which you don't want to perpetuate.
• Children/Threaded buried: this one has similar meaning to the former, but it should be applied to nested/threaded/children comments of the flagged comment.

 

Note that any comment can be independently flagged as Buried and Children buried, therefore a Children buried comment shouldn't have special styles applied to itself. In the same way, you can also have a featured AND buried comment, having both styles should be applied together!

 

 

Hikari Featured Comments provides a special metabox in comment edit page (/wp-admin/comment.php?action=editcomment&c=XXXX) where you can flag these properties, and it automatically attach new classes (featured, buried, children_buried) to comments in frontend.

 

 

ScreenShots

 

The custom metabox in comment's edit page, together with another metabox, just below comment's content textarea

 

 

You can see live exemples below in comments area. Note that I developed a special jQuery code that collapses and expands comments, having buried comments collapsed by default!

 

 

License

 

© Copyright Hikari (http://wordpress.Hikari.ws), 2010

If you want to redistribute this software, please leave a link to this post together with it and mention me as its author

Parts of this code are provided or based on ideas and/or code written by others

 

Important contributors to this plugin (listed in alphabetical order):

• Utkarsh (http://wpprogrammer NULL.com)'s Feature Comments (http://wpprogrammer NULL.com/feature-comments-wordpress-plugin/)

 

If you want to extend the plugin features, please contact me so I can add your work to my official release.

 

 

Download

 

You can follow Hikari Featured Comments updates and older versions at Wordpress.org Plugin Directory (http://wordpress NULL.org/extend/plugins/hikari-featured-comments/), or you can get the last version from the direct link hikari-featured-comments.zip (http://downloads NULL.wordpress NULL.org/plugin/hikari-featured-comments NULL.zip).

 

 

Donate

 

If you enjoy Hikari Featured Comments please consider a donation. You can do it through Paypal:

 

 

There are also several ways you can show your appreciation:

 

• blogging about it
• linking it from your site (without using rel=nofollow)
• browsing the site sidebars
• suggesting it to your friends
• visiting other posts thru the site and adding valuable comments
• saying thanks on comments
• offering codes that add new features
• etc, use your imagination

 

 

Installation

 

Hikari Featured Comments requires at least Wordpress 2.9 and PHP5 to work.

 

You can use the built in installer and upgrader, or you can install the plugin manually.

 

1. Download the zip file, upload it to your server and extract all its content to your /wp-content/plugins folder. Make sure the plugin has its own folder (for exemple /wp-content/plugins/hikari-featured-comments/).
2. Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress admin page.
3. That's it! Go to any comment you wanna flag, open its edit page and see the new metabox available!
4. At first, no change will be visible. You must edit your theme's comment.php or style.css to add any feature your creativity creates based on these properties.

 

 

Upgrading

 

If you have to upgrade manually, simply delete hikari-featured-comments folder and follow installation steps again.

 

 

Uninstalling

 

I've made an article just to explain in full details which options we have to upgrade and uninstall our plugins and what happens with each option, and how it works with my plugins: Uninstalling my plugins.

 

 

Support & Requests

 

If you want to request any new feature, leave a comment on this post explaining it with as many details as possible. I can't assure it will be added, but if it is viable, I like it AND have the time, I'll do my best.

 

If something seems to not be working and you need help, first read the FAQ and then leave a comment explaining what's happening. If you need to post a picture, please link it instead of using an img tag.

 

 

FAQ

 

1. Ok, I installed your plugin and as expected nothing happens when I flag a comment as featured. What now?

   Now your creativity defines what happens! These properties open a variety of possibilities, in both Web Design and Web Development areas!

    

   If you wanna give special CSS styles to flagged comments, just go to your theme's style.css, search for the section where comments styles are and add new styles there. A very simple exemple:

   .comment.featured{
   	weight: bold;
   }
   .comment.buried{
   	display: none;
   }
   

2. Nice! This gives me some great ideas, but that would require more advanced code... What can you offer?

   If you wanna develop extra features based on these properties, I provide 3 functions to help you:

   • hkFC_is_comment_featured($comment)
   • hkFC_is_comment_buried($comment)
   • hkFC_is_comment_children_buried($comment)

    

   Just pass a comment object or ID as parameter to receive a boolean return saying if that comment is flagged or not, you can also pass a null parameter to use current comment. There are also 3 filters you can use to change a comment property just before any code retrieves that data, without needing to hack the plugin:

   • apply_filters( 'hkFC_is_comment_featured', $featured, $comment_id )
   • apply_filters( 'hkFC_is_comment_buried', $buried, $comment_id )
   • apply_filters( 'hkFC_is_comment_children_buried', $children_buried, $comment_id )

 

 

 

Cangelog

 

• 0.02 - 04/10/2010
  • First public release.

 

 

Known bugs

 

• none ATM

 

To-do stuff

 

Here are my ideas that I wish to implement in the future.

 

• Add some default features to be used out of the box to highlught and bury comments.

 

 

Thanks

 

Thanks to all my friends that support me and thumbs me up to continue.

 

Thanks to everybody who use my plugins (even not donating). Thanks to everybody that add comments to my site!

 

And most of all to everybody that hire me as consultant to implement custom code for their ideas!

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