I’ve gone ahead and implemented paging for my comment displays here on cf.org since I have several posts where there are a couple hundred comments. For those of you who haven’t seen it, this functionality is available in plugin form these days. It’s a nice plugin and provides the functionality as well as can be expected, but were I to do it from scratch I’d likely go about it slightly differently so that the theme’s comment template was leveraged somehow. As it stands I had to make considerable modifications in order to get my rather customized comment functionality worked in. But it’s there.
I think the ability to view all of the comments at once is useful for doing textual searches, so I’ve modified the original plugin to allow viewing of the complete list of comments if desired. I’ve ordered the views kind of differently as well depending on what’s being displayed. If you’re paging through the comments, you’ll see the most recent comments first, starting from the newest comment at the top of the first page to the oldest comment at the bottom of the last page. I figure if you’re paging you’re likely interested in the most recent content first. However, if you’re viewing all the comments on one page — or if the post has 10 comments or fewer such that it’s implicitly one page — the comments display from oldest to newest. We’ll see how this works out. I think it’s not overly confusing given the displayed comment index… you know that comment 99 is older than comment 100 regardless of any relative display ordering.
Have a look and tell me what you think.
4 Responses to “Paged comment display”
Paged Comments plugin released
Paged Comments is a WordPress plugin to enable comments on posts to be split into pages. Installation instructions and demo available on the plugin’s page. Update (2005-05-14): Brian from ColdForged.org (author of the Paged Comment Editing plug…
must … release … code !
Actually, the author of the original plugin worked in my changes into his codebase. You can grab it here.
I just started using this plugin for my guestbook and I love it.