Top 18 Plugins and Hacks for Wordpress Comments Page

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Wordpress has unique design comment form which 'encourage' readers to leave comment. Basically it allows reader to input their emails, name, and website and which is why many people are prefer to commenting in wordpress because it asks you more 'close' about your personal information. Nowadays, a lots of people out there were trying to improve and enhance their wordpress comment form into something innovative.

1. Alternating Colors for Comments Column

Having different colors for each column of your comment would be wonderful to have. Especially when you're interested to have multiple colors than 1 colors. There's 2 option that you could use, first from Tamba2.org and second from NetTuts

2. Colouring Single/Multiple Author Comment

When you decide to change your author comment color, then its time to use this hack, there are 2 hack, first from MattCutts Blog and second from WP Hacks Blog. I'm currently using tips from WP Hacks and you can see the result from my comment section here.

3. Comment Numbers

If you want to try something new and you decide to give the number for each comment you have, then you could try to use tips from WP Engineer or from Nettuts. Both are worth to try.

4. Displaying Recent Comments

Displaying Recents comments in your blog can gives the new visitor a new looks about what's the current topic that has being commented. In this case, you can choose between put the code manually or Install the plugins

5. Displaying How much Comments/Trackback

You may want to inform your visitor on how much is the comment/trackback that your blogs have. Well, this trick will tell you how. Basically you just need to find appropriate place in your blog and paste the code. Here's how you can display number of comment and trackback

6. Put Avatar On Your Comments - Gravatar/MyBlogLog/Twitter avatars

Avatar is an identity for author, not just for author but for the reader also. This features always available on every forums, social media and social networking site but how if we do commenting on blog?! Can we get our avatar as well? Gravatar is the place where you can make your avatar based on your registered emails. To display this on your blog comments, you need plugins or code. However, the latest WP 2.7+ version has this features by default, so i'm just giving additional advice in case you're still using old WP version. For Twitter avatar, you can grab it from WP Recipes Blog. For MyBlogLog Avatar, you can use WP Gravatar plugins. You can even create your own gravatar with just 5 minutes

7. Editing Comments

This hack allows the site author to edit your comment directly from your blog post pages. Its a good thing if you feel lazy to edit comment from your admin CP.

8. Paginated Comments

You have lots of comment like 100+ comment on single post and you decide to separate it by paginating them. There are 2 plugins to choose, first from Wordpress Plugins site and last from 2i2j Blogs. Personally i'm using plugin from 2i2j Blogs, Because its easy to modify and re-arrange

9. Editing Comments for Admin and Visitor

For visitor, when you leave comment and you notice about something like you want to add more text, fix the link, etc You can now allows your visitor to edit their comment by using this plugins. Basically the plugin uses AJAX function like the one i use in my threaded comment. However if the site admin moderates the comment then it is most likely that this hack will turned out to be meaningless

10. Notify Your Users About Incoming Comments

Do you want to notify your reader about new comments? then use the plugins from TxFx.net. This plugin will send reader a notification by email about new comments to which blog post they are commented.

11. Displaying The Most Commented

Your blog has a lot of comment but you don know which blog post are being commented the most. This Plugins will show you exactly how much comment on certain blog post. If you don like the looks of it then you could try to manually place this code

12. Separate Comments and Trackbacks

Trackback is the link created by other site owner that linking back to your blog post. Comment is a message made by you and your reader. By Default, comments and trackback are being displayed together into comments list. Its hard to determine which one is the comment and which one is trackback. But a little help from ProBlogDesign will teach you how.

13. Displaying The Allowed Tags

This hacks will not teach you to show the tags of your blog post instead it teaches you to show what is the tags that are allowed to put inside comment text area.

14. Remove The Nofollow Attributes from Comments

For those who wants to gives the 'credit' to the commenter, then this hack is a must-to-have. There are two plugins for this: DoFollow 4.0 and Nofollow Free.

15. Gives Innovatives Smiley Icon

Wordpress as default are displaying only the basic smiley icon, if you're bored with the current smiley icon, then try something innovative like giving Monkey Smiley Icon or Yahoo Messenger Smiley Icon

16. Give Star Rating to Your Comments

Usually when people are commenting, they sometimes can gives valuable information and if other reader feels that their comments deserved to get rated, then this plugin will help those reader to gives the 'credit'.

17. Comment Validation Hacks

The Best ways to fight against spammer is to gives them Turing number. It will asks your reader to calculate simple math such as num, minus. This hacks is probably a must for WP 2.7 user or other blogs who had good traffic site.

18. Threaded/Nested Comments

If you like to have debates with your reader, then using wordpress thread comment will enables you to do that. Its similar to Intense Debate but with AJAX function to make your comment post much faster and without requiring you to load the pages. It has also up to 3 level nested comment. Another hacks to nested comment up to 10 level is by using the hack from CD Harisson Blogs. There are 2 methods to try out: