Paged Comment Editing PluginPaged Comment Editing Plugin

Announcing the Paged Comment Editing plugin. No, doesn’t sound as fancy as the Image Headline plugin or even the Spell Checker plugin and your readers will reap no benefit, but it does have some merit for you, the WordPress author. This plugin overhauls the stock comment editing interface to provide the following capabilities:

  • Finally page through all of your comments in the comment administration interface. The stock interface is limited to displaying the 20 most-recent comments. If you’re anything like me, you’ll burn through 20 in 2 days tops. You’ll now be free to read and edit every comment on your installation with ease. This plugin supports paging through your comments, including arbitrary numbers of posts per page as well as paging of comment searching.
  • See the comments that can’t be seen. WordPress 1.5 Strayhorn added some reasonably powerful if simplistic comment spam combating measures based on blacklists. This is wonderful, but if a comment happens to be tagged as spam by WordPress you will never see it again unless you do it external to WordPress via phpMyAdmin or something like it. Therefore, you have no way of knowing if a comment was inappropriately marked as spam. This plugin makes those invisible comments visible again… but only when you want them. With appropriate blacklist in place, 99% of the things marked as spam will be spam and you certainly don’t want to sift through that all day. But it’s nice to be able to rescue that 1% that otherwise would have disappeared into the ether.

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Installation

Note that this plugin requires WordPress version 1.5 Strayhorn or any of the 1.5.1 nightlies. Do not install this plugin on a 1.3 beta or earlier release. Installing the plugin couldn’t be easier. Choose from the following methods:

  • EASIEST –> One-Click Install via the WordPress Plugin Manager - Go to your WPPM plugins page, refresh the view, and look under the ‘Admin Tools’ section for the “Paged Comment Editing” plugin. Click on the name and click on “One-Click Install”. You’re done.
  • Manual install by ZIP file - Download the zip file and extract the ‘edit-comments-full.php’ file from it. Upload that file to your server and make sure it goes into the ‘wp-content/plugins’ directory. Visit your WordPress administration interface’s Plugins page and activate the plugin.
  • Manual install by tarball - Download the tarball and upload it to your server. Make sure that it is in the ‘wp-content/plugins’ directory, then untar it with the 'tar xvzf paged-comment-editing.tar.gz' command. Visit your WordPress administration interface’s Plugins page and activate the plugin.

Usage

Using the plugin is even easier. There’s nothing special to do, just visit your standard ‘Manage’ –> ‘Comments’ page in the WordPress administration interface. It should look a bit different but it works pretty much the same as you’re used to. If you have many comments on your blog, you’ll see an area with Pages: followed by links of page numbers. Click on a page number link to immediately jump to that page of comments. Want to see more or less comments per page? Change the number of comments to display on each page by typing a number into the ‘Show:’ input box and either click on the ‘Show:’ button or press return after entering the number. Want to see if you have any comment spam? Click on the “Include Spam” link and any comments marked as spam will be instantly recognizable. Don’t see any spam on that page? Click on the “Only Spam” link and see all of the spam you’ve gathered. All of these features work with searching as well. Want to find any spam comments about Viagra? Enter Viagra in the search box while you have spam included.

Removal

Removal is rather straightforward as well. You can either deactivate the plugin or remove the plugin file entirely. No core WordPress files are touched, ever.

Support

If you have problems or questions, feel free to leave a comment here. There are currently 165 comments about this plugin. Join the discussion!

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