Comment editing and previewing

I’ve added the Edit Comments plugin, which enables limited comment editing.

For two hours after a comment is posted, if you are viewing the site from the same IP address, you will see an “Edit this” link after your comments. Please feel free to test below, and let me know if this doesn’t work.

I spent some time today reading the WP code and think it wouldn’t be too hard to submit a patch which integrates “Edit own comments” into the main WP codebase. I think I might do that. I need to think about the way administrator comment editing works, and it would be cool if that functionality played nice with roles.

Also, I added the Filosofo Comments Preview, so comments are now preview-able.

For both of these plugins, I need to tweak the templates I’m using a bit, but they should work fine. If not, let me know.

I’ve also tweaked quite a bit of the colors to improve the contrast and make links more noticeable, and and fussed with layout a bit too. Gawd, these style sheets have some funky cascadance.

16 Responses to “Comment editing and previewing”

  1. John writes:

    Playing with the new comment preview and editing features.

    edited addition: I’ve got the text size in Firefox for MacOS set on default and the editing link was small and hard to read. I might not have noticed it if I wasn’t looking for it. The preview function worked just fine and this editing seems to be working fine as well.

    And this paragraph is an edit of the edited version. Still seems to be working fine.

  2. cbd writes:

    Good criticism. I made the date and time bigger, and decided that wasn’t good enough. So I moved the “Edit this” link to the bottom and changed the text to “Edit this comment.” What do you think?

    Now I just have to figure out how to get the “Preview” and “Post” buttons to line up, and then work on the preview page a bit more…

  3. cbd writes:

    Oh, and let me know if you see the “Edit this comment” link on comments besides your’n :)

  4. John writes:

    More testing.

    Edited: Oh, yes, the “Edit this comment” link was much easier to see, and it only showed up on this comment. I guess the real question is if someone can come by sometime in the next two hours from a different IP address.

  5. cbd writes:

    I don’ t see “Edit” links under your comments unless I am logged in as an administrator.

    Thanks for the testing!

  6. Daniel Anderson writes:

    I like the new color scheme too. I don’t think it is just the change. The colors do seem to bounce the links and make me feel happier. Not sure if it matters, but the preview display does differ from the comment itself in the way the commenter and date are not written out. Never thought about that before and doubt it will influence anything but is it possible that the comment text is overwhelmed a bit by the heading at the top of the preview page? I also like the alternating blocks of color for the comments–very helpful.

    Now on my edit of the comment, I’m having trouble getting the preview to work. Preview seems to be posting the comment rather than bringing up the earlier priview page. I’m on Safari 1.31.

  7. cbd writes:

    Even though it’s cold as hell here, I am feeling the proximity of spring: the local organic farm where Erin works is doing its membership drive, and some of my students are already talking about their break . That, and I wanted the weblog to look very different than that for my New Media class.

    I do need to clean up the preview page; it’s a different template than this one. Just haven’t had a chance yet. Hopefully once I do that, preview will play nicer with editing.

    Those alternating blocks of color were there before—but the color was so light that it was easy to miss.

  8. erich writes:

    Bradley: I don’t know if it’s just my system (Firefox 1.5 on Ubuntu Breezy), but the font size for the comments is really small.

  9. cbd writes:

    The comments in the form entry box and in the comment display, should be the same size as the main body type. Is that not the case? (I speak of the main page, not preview; I haven’t fooled with that.)

    Part of the problem: this layout isn’t liquid and I think the center column is too narrow. I’ll see what I can do to fix that.

  10. erich writes:

    Well, yeah, now that you mention it, the main body text is tiny too.

  11. erich writes:

    Looking at the CSS, I’d say that the culprit is this definition in body:

    font-size: 62.5%; /* Resets 1em to 10px */.

    Why so small? Changing this value to 75% results in a more legible font size, at least on my system.

    –E

  12. cbd writes:

    That’s part of the theme I installed. I tweaked it, but the way it’s applied makes some stuff funky.

    When I upgrade to WP 2.0, my plan is to build a very stripped-down theme which is highly accessible. But piling more effort on this dungheap ain’t worth it.

  13. erich writes:

    >> When I upgrade to WP 2.0

    Via the Dreamhost panel, this should take about 10 seconds.

  14. cbd writes:

    Yeah, if you are happy with an OOTB install. I ain’t.

  15. Erich writes:

    Umm…why not?

  16. cbd writes:

    Ugly themes, lack of plugins, a bazillion little options I tweaked. I just don’t feel like dealing with that now.