Getting inline comments on any WordPress Theme Homepage

Shubhodeep Das — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:29:01 +0000

Just like this Blog’s homepage. The steps are easy. Here is a small description into how I got this done on this blog. Why I got this done is explained first. Over the years I have shied away from commenting on Blogs simply because one has to click and go to a comments popup form or a post page, not that works just fine on larger posts where there are tons of stuff to read, tons of Maps and Images and other stuff to go through, but for a very simple day to day blogging, that kind of comes across as a lose nut in the theme, and that’s how I got around to get this done.

Here’s how.

Step 1. Open you index.php file in the theme and locate the loop. That should look like this. It should start with the following:

And end with the following:

....

Between these two parts is where your posts pop up and the whole thing is repeated over and over again depending on the amount of posts you would want to load up on the homepage, which can be set right there in the settings. We don’t want to touch that.

Step 2: Now open your single.php file and find this small piece of code.

Change that to:

Copy that and paste it right above the end of the loop, just before this:

....

This should result in the comments form and the comments to pop up right under each post. But that would also pop up a bunch of errors as each form field ID would get repeated over and over again, and that can’t be cool.

Step 3: Now open the comments.php file in your theme directory. In that you will have to locate each ID identifying each field in the comments form. Either prefix or suffix them with the following code to make them unique. The code pulls out the post ID and adds a suffix to the already existing ID after a hyphen. Here’s how:

/>

Becomes:

/>

Note the:

-

added right after the “author” in the ID of the Input Field. Do this for all the fields and submit buttons. Once you are done, you are error free for most of the part. But there still remains one problem, now when the page loads, you will see all the comments form and that cant be good, it would look cluttered and bad.

Step 4: Add or Change the “Reply” button under the post, in most themes this button is linked to the post page.

Instead put this Hyperlink to the “Reply” button:

Reply

By any luck, you would have already added the “Post ID” identifier to the “respond” ID in the comments.php. That leaves us with the Javascript. Copy the following code and place it within the section of your header.php file.

Thats it. you are done. This Javascript will simply “Show/hide” your comments form identified by “respond-(postID)”. Now I am no PHP guru, but this seems to work just fine returning zero errors.

[Edit] If you are copying the codes from above in green. Make sure you copy them into Notepad / Textedit and remove all formatting (convert to plain text) before pasting them in.

Most Innovative Spam

Shubhodeep Das — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 07:26:33 +0000

“I don’t know if i totally agree with that. But nevertheless, you make a good point. What if I can come up with a response in opposition to your arguments”

Yep. That’s a spam caught in Akismet. On a regular blog that may sound like a legit comment, but when its posted on a tweet that criticizes .aspx pages and from a Light Bulb company. It’s a Spam. Good try.

P2 from Automattic

Shubhodeep Das — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:55:24 +0000

The P2 theme from Automattic is probably the best theme there till date for an active blog. It supports inline comments and posting right from the homepage itself. The inline comments on this blog is also inspired by the P2 theme, in future would probably style P2 to run on this blog.

Timeline-Studios Blog » Wordpress

Getting inline comments on any WordPress Theme Homepage

Most Innovative Spam

P2 from Automattic