Absolute Comments: Comment Manager with Instant Reply « planetOzh

Responding to comments left by readers is a critical part of watering your blog so it grows and keeps healthy. Out of the box, WordPress mostly sucks at this: you need to visit your own post and post a reply just as a visitor would do. How suboptimal and time wasting. What you want is the ability to reply to comments from within the same page as where you manage them. What you want is a real “Manage Comments” page.

Absolute Comments : comments as they were meant to be

A simple image being worth a thousand words, let me show you how such a “Manage Comments” page should be:

Absolute Comments : Features

This wonderful plugin will change your blogging life because :

• Effective integration
  It is completely transparently integrated within WordPress. No extra page, just WordPress the way you wanted it to be.
• Cute icons
  Did you see all the tiny icons on the action links? How cute! (can turn them off if you don’t like them, of course).
• Quick Reply
  If you have mail notifications activated (ie you get a mail each time a comment is posted), the mail will contain a handy Quick Reply link to make things faster than ever.
  
• Comment Reply Prefill
  When replying to Joe, do you always like to start your comment with “Joe »” or “@Joe:” ? Define an automatic pattern so you won’t have to type it everytime (the big animated screenshot above shows this feature)
• Threaded Comments Support
  Your blog runs whatever plugin to support threaded comments ? So does Absolute Comments
• Translations Included
  Absolute Comments comes in:
  • English,
  • French,
  • Finnish,
  • Danish,
  • German,
  • Brazilian,
  • Chinese Simplified,
  • Chinese Traditional,
  • Hebrew (with some RTL support! That was fun:),
  • Italian,
  • Tagalog (Philippines),
  • Romanian,
  • Norwegian flavors

  See below for thankful credits. The translation template file (.pot) is included, so anyone speaking something that’s not English and using poEdit is encouraged to share their words!

Options and Tweaks

Out of the zip, the plugin will run fine and will probably satisfy you more than your craziest expectations (or refunded!). Of course there are a few options you can customize to make yourself feel at home. Rename file my_options_sample.php to my_options.php (this file won’t be overwritten when you update the plugin, keeping your settings safe) and edit the following optons:

• $wp_ozh_cqr['editor_rows'] (integer, or false)
  The number of lines of the textarea to type comment in, when using the “Quick Reply” page and its advanced editor. Set to false to leave default size, as defined in Options / Writing.
• $wp_ozh_cqr['show_icon'] (boolean)
  Default value is true to add the cute icons to the “Manage Comments” page. Turn off to false if for some reason you hate them.
• $wp_ozh_cqr['prefill_reply'] (string)
  This string will define, is not empty, the comment prefilling of your replies. Enter some text and HTML, using %%name%% and %%link%% as tokens to be replaced with the commenter’s name and their comment permalink (should work with most if not all themes)
  Examples of use:
  “%%name%% » ” → will begin your replies with “Joe » “
  “@<a href=”%%link%%”>%%name%%</a>: ” → “@Joe:”
• $wp_ozh_cqr['show_threaded'] (boolean)
  True will add the “Threaded Reply” button, false will hide it. Note: you need a “threaded comments” plugin and/or theme. This is not a feature in itself.
• $wp_ozh_cqr['show_allcomments'] (boolean)
  True will add a link to show all comments on a page, false won’t. But the “View All” icon is so pretty that you’ll want to leave its default value:)

Limitations and troubleshooting

There are a couple of very minor limitations I thought you might need to now, if you haven’t guessed most already

• 2.5 everywhere: current version if for WordPress 2.5+ and won’t work below. See below for older versions.
• Ajax everywhere: it obviously means you need to have Javascript enabled.
• Javascript everywhere: it means it will have to break some day or another due to the browser, another plugin conflicting, the KGB spying on you, or anything that might look like an excuse for Javascript not to run smoothly. This said, it was developed and tested in MSIE6 and Firefox with nothing but extreme pleasure.

In any case if things are not running as expected, please read the Troubleshooting guide.

Download Absolute Comments

“Enough of your useless documentation” you think, “give me the plugin !!”. OK Boss. Here it is.

Older version

Credits and Love

• This plugin has been generously tested and translated by the following kind people, in no particular order:
  • Chinese Simplified: by Arctic
  • Chinese Traditional: by Cronobow
  • Italian: by Sergio Gandrus
  • German: by iKArus
  • Hebrew: by Elad Salomons
  • Romanian: by octav
  • Finnish: by sadejousi
  • Brasilian Portuguese: by Daniel Kaiser
  • Italian: Sergio Gandrus
  • Tagalog: Manuel Viloria
  • Norwegian: Einar Helland Berger
  • Danish: Thomas
  • English & French: by myself and moi-même
• On early development stages, I’ve had very encouraging feedback and suggestions from Maki, who I thank again for this.
• I’m in love with jQuery. Writing Javascript gets almost fun :)

If you like this plugin and you feel it enhances your blogging and community managing experiences, please make my day and simply blog about it to let your readers know about it. They might like it too:)

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