Spectacu.la Discussion

Screenshots

Ever found your theme doesn’t support threaded comments? Would you like it to be able to have P2 style live commenting on your site? Spectacu.la Discussion is a plugin that replaces the commenting code in your theme with a fully Ajaxed comments engine. The plugin uses memory tables for fast caching within the database (no pesky permission setting for you to worry about here) and adjustible polling times to suit a wide range of server performance. The plugin is also developer friendly, meaning that you can easily add styles to your theme so that should a user implement the plugin your meticulous design can be carried through. By default there are two styles that should work in most cases. Read below for further instructions. Once installed this plug-in will replace your theme’s comments template with its own fully Ajax comment template. This allows both submission and update of comments without a page refres letting your visitors use it more as a chat room than the more traditional comment system. You can also roll up replied which can be told to trigger at any depth you feel is best using the settings page. Also available on the plug-ins admin page is the option to use another or no stylesheet, toggle the live updating of comments and change the refresh period for live update. As of version 2 you can now easily add new stylesheets to the available list by either copying them into the plug-in’s style folder with a comment at the top of the sheet that looks like this /* comment style: Stylesheet name */ or adding a commenting.css to your theme or child theme. Once added they will then be listed in the dropdown menu that shows on the admin page. The plugin is also, of course, Multisites compatible. =The filters= There are a few filters available for developers to intercept the javascript, paramerers passed to the javascript and the CSS file location spec_comment_css Passes the URL of the stylesheet through to your function to replace with your own file. spec_comment_js Passes the URL to the jQuery file that controls the roll up and a few other elements. spec_comment_local_js Passes in an array of localisation strings that are passed to the jQuery code. To replace the CSS file you could add something like the following to your functions.php that would point to a comments.css file in the folder of your current theme. This will then override any choice made by the user on the admin page. <?php add_filter('spec_comment_css', 'my_css_file'); function my_css_file() { return get_bloginfo('template_directory') . '/comments.css'; } ?> Warning Every effort has been made to make this work with as wide a variety of themes as possible but we can’t cover every eventuality so some themes out there will cause problems with this plugin without you doing something to either the plug-in or the theme first. The most likely cause of problems is that some of the CSS in the theme conflicts with the CSS in the comments. There are various other areas where problems could arise, such as if the theme doesn’t call the comments.php using the comments_template(); template tag or if your theme deals with comments in an unusual way, such as placing them in a sidebar or calling them in using Ajax that conflicts with our own. A missing or unusual DOCTYPE could cause problems too, in fact there are lots of things that could cause strangeness. However with most of the themes I’ve tested this with it has worked without issue straight out of the gate and even if it doesn’t look right you need only disable the plug-in to go back to how things were, so nothing’s lost.