I've recently moved to WordPress an active community site which is run and moderated by several editors and administrators. Each post gets dozens of comments, and I wanted to highlight those made by staff members.<\/p>\n
If you've googled a bit for a solution on how to identify authors' or admins' comments, you've probably seen several explanations on how to implement this by comparing emails. Something like:<\/p>\n
<?php\r\nif( $comment->comment_author_email == 'admin@blog.com' ) {\r\n\t$class = 'admin';\r\n}\r\n?><\/code><\/pre><\/div>\nWhile this is sort of OK for a single author weblog, it's totally inconvenient and not scalable for a community site run by several editors and administrators: you would need to edit the template file whenever there's a new member in the staff, and nothing prevents an unlogged user from commenting using your well known email address.<\/p>\n
So, what to do instead?
\n<\/p>\n
First, collect all users and their role<\/h2>\n
WordPress function get_users_of_blog()<\/tt> returns an array of all users with their user_id and role. We're going to loop through all users and collect their id's and roles in an array.<\/p>\n$users = get_users_of_blog();\r\nforeach( $users as $user ) {\r\n\t$role = array_pop( array_keys( unserialize($user->meta_value) ) ); \/\/ yeah, I know, looks awkward :)\r\n\t$user_id = $user->user_id;\r\n\tif ( $role != 'subscriber' ) \/\/ collect id of anyone whose role is greater than 'subscriber'\r\n\t\t$roles[ $user_id ] = $role;\r\n}<\/code><\/pre><\/div>\nAt this point, the array $roles<\/tt> is populated with something like:<\/p>\n$roles = array (\r\n\t'1' => 'administrator',\r\n\t'2' => 'editor',\r\n\t'3' => 'editor',\r\n\t'4' => 'administrator',\r\n\t'5' => 'author',\r\n);<\/code><\/pre><\/div>\nNow identify for each comment the commenter's role<\/h2>\n
Typically, your theme has a file named comments.php<\/tt> with a loop that looks like this:<\/p>\n<ol id="commentlist">\r\n<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>\r\n\t<li>\r\n\t<p>By <?php comment_author_link() ?> - <?php comment_date() ?><\/p>\r\n\t<?php comment_text() ?>\r\n\t<\/li>\r\n<?php endforeach; ?>\r\n<\/ol><\/code><\/pre><\/div>\nWordPress fetches every comment as an object containing, among others, the following informations:<\/p>\n
stdClass Object (\r\n [comment_author] => Joe\r\n [comment_author_email] => joe@email.com\r\n [comment_author_url] => http:\/\/joe.com\/\r\n [comment_author_IP] => 100.101.102.103\r\n [user_id] => 4\r\n)<\/code><\/pre><\/div>\nIf the user is logged in, $comment->user_id<\/tt> is an integer greater than 0. If the user is not logged in (assuming non logged users can comment), $comment->user_id<\/tt> is zero.<\/p>\n
A trivial way to get an user's role would be to issue a call to get_userdata( $user_id )<\/tt> within the comment loop but that would add an extra query per logged in user, which is an unnecessary burden if you an active community of commenters and a lot of registered users.<\/p>\n
Instead we'll simply compare each user_id with what we've collected at the beginning. The comment loop would be something like:<\/p>\n
<ol id="commentlist">\r\n<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>\r\n\t<?php \/\/ The extra stuff to get commenter's role\r\n\t$user_id = $comment->user_id;\r\n\t$role = ( isset( $roles[$user_id] ) ? $roles[$user_id] : '' );\r\n\t?>\r\n\t<li class="<?php echo $role; ?>">\r\n\t<p>By <?php comment_author_link() ?> - <?php comment_date() ?><\/p>\r\n\t<?php comment_text() ?>\r\n\t<\/li>\r\n<?php endforeach; ?>\r\n<\/ol><\/code><\/pre><\/div>\nNow, identifying staff comments is just a matter of CSS:<\/p>\n
#commentlist li { border:2px solid white; } \/* not logged or subscriber *\/\r\n#commentlist li.administrator { border:2px solid red } \/* blog admin *\/\r\n#commentlist li.editor { border:2px solid blue } \/* editor *\/<\/code><\/pre><\/div>\nAll in all<\/h2>\n
All in all, this very simple method only adds one extra query to the whole page (issued by get_users_of_blog()<\/tt>). You could even easily get rid of that extra query with caching in a flat .php file the array produced by get_users_of_blog()<\/tt> and refresh it with hooking into 'set_user_role' (see wp-includes\/capabilities.php<\/tt>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I've recently moved to WordPress an active community site which is run and moderated by several editors and administrators. Each post gets dozens of comments, and I wanted to highlight those made by staff members. What not to do If you've googled a bit for a solution on how to identify authors' or admins' comments, you've probably seen several explanations\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[2,324,245],"class_list":["post-1363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-published","tag-code","tag-comments","tag-wordpress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}