The forum-like tracking comments plugin, that I talked about earlier, is now live on this blog (thanks for the great work Enej!): see recent comment link above the header.
It works, it is stable and it covers the basics that we have originally defined:
- Ability to expand/collapse post and its comments (little plus in front of post);
- Sort the posts by
- time published (default, though I think we should make sorting by latest comments default),
- name of the post,
- author,
- number of comments,
- date/time of the latest comment.
Now that it is live, I see that few small things could be added:
- Remove the posts with no comments – the point of this plugin is to show activity on posts;
- Tighten up the user interface to look better, perhaps apply gray to the first row (one that carries the columns’ names);
- Ability to expand/collapse ALL post with one click (big plus in the header of the table, left of the post);
- Add the date/time for each comments;
- Ability to sort comments by date/time;
- Trim the post to first X words with more link to load the full post (since it is your post you do not really the whole thing here);
- Limit posts to latest 10 or so with see more link that will load all other comments;
- Have a little control panel (options) thing so that the user could setup the preferences for the most of the above (how many post/comments, default sorting, exclusion of certain columns – like author in personal blogs, etc…).
We have submitted the code to WordPress Codec, and once it is published I hope that others will join to continue the development of this plugin.
So, please support this plugin and comment on the this post and previous posts to give this plugin a proper test!
I would remove the + expand option makes the screen very cluttered once expanded. The user should go straight to the post like a normal forum listing.
that should definitely be user option in the plugin’s control panel!
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Hey novak – I’m thrilled to see this plugin! I can see it’s working on Brian’s site and would love to know a bit more about how to implement it.