The Engineered Boulderer

One time on flickr I was looking at the “Photos you’ve commented on” feature, and thought, wouldn’t it be great if we had that on our blogs? Then we could follow the discussions we’re taken part in.

If you are not familiar with this feature, it’s a list of a number of photos you’ve commented on with newer responses shown too. I took a little screenshot for clarification purposes.

For each photo the title is shown – for example Worst ad ever! – along with the total number of comments and the number of comments since your latest. Unless you’re over the threshold the first comment shown is your own, followed by the newer comments.

My idea was to include it in the sidebar, but including the comment text as flickr does would be a little to extreme. I simply include the name of the author of the newer comments.

I’ve included a limit, if there are more new comments than this limit, only the newest within the limit are shown (with an elipsis in front). By default the limit is 6 comments. The limit on the number of posts to show comments from is 5 by default. These are the same default limits as Brian Meidell’s Latest Comments plugin. In general the resulting html has taken a page from Brian’s plugin. This plugin also incooperates the comment temperature feature as seen in Brian’s Latest Comments. The implementation of that feature is courtesy of Brian.

Plugin will be available shortly, just have to clean up a bit and document it.

*Update:* There is a bug in the plugin where the listing of the comments is borked. I thought I had the SQL figured out, but I guess I’ll have to revisit it. I’ve taken the link down until I’ve fixed it.

Update: Error has been fixed, get it here: Your Comments and place the extracted php file in the plugins folder of your wordpress blog.

System Requirements

• Wordpress 1.5 or later
• PHP 4.3.0 or later

Changelog

1.1b1 First version that wasn’t totally broken.
1.1b2 Corrected how the user was shown and included some options to control what was shown.

Documentation

Add the function teb_your_comments() to your template where you want the plugin result to be shown. The function uses url type arguments.

Tag parameters

post_limit
(number) Sets the maximum number of posts for which to show comments. Default is 5.

new_cmnt_limit
(number) Sets the maximum number of new comments to show for each post. If the number of new comments exceeds this threshold only the newest comments within this number are shown. The behavior of what else is shown is dependent on the always_show_user and show_cut parameters. Default is 6.

hide_pingbacks_and_trackbacks
(boolean) Does what it says.

• 1 (true – default)
• 0 (false)

user_class
(string) The class for the link to the newest comment by user. Default is ‘user’.

user_name
(string) The name to use for the user, can be any text, a percent sign is substituted with the name of the user as set by them when they wrote the comment. Default is ‘%’.

always_show_user
(boolean) Selects whether the user should be shown on every post where he’s commented, or only those that have more new comments than the new_cmnt_limit.

• 1 (true – default)
• 0 (false)

show_cut
(boolean) Show an elipsis before the user for posts where the number of new comments exceed new_cmnt_limit. The elipsis is a link to the first comment after the latest user comment.

• 1 (true – default)
• 0 (false)

prefix
(string) Text to insert before each post, for example an HTML tag. Default is ‘<li>’.

postfix
(string) Text to insert after each post and its comments, for example an HTML tag. Default is ‘</li&gt’;.

stats_class
(string) The class for the span element where the total and new number of comments are shown. Default is ‘stats’.

fade_old
(boolean) Should we use the comment temperature feature?

• 1 (true – default)
• 0 (false)

range_in_days
(number) The number of days it takes for a comment to fade from the newest color to the oldest color. Default is 10 days.

new_col
(string) The color of a completely new post in RGB hex format. The default is a dark gray, #444444.

old_col
(string) The color of a post that is as old or older than the number of days given by the “range in days” argument, same format as new_col. Default is light gray, #cccccc.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 12th, 2005 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Plugins, WordPress, Geekiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.