Spectacu.la Discussion

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

1. spec_comment_css
   Passes the URL of the stylesheet through to your function to replace
   with your own file.
2. spec_comment_js
   Passes the URL to the jQuery file that controls the roll up and a few
   other elements.
3. 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.

The install

You can either install the plugin using the WordPress auto-installer, or
manually:

1. Upload commenting.php and all sub folders to
   /wp-content/plugins/spec-comments/ or /wp-content/mu-plugins/ directory.
   If the directory doesn’t exist then create it.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
3. You should now see an extra menu show up under the settings menu in the main
   admin sidebar.
4. Check a page on your site with comments and see that everything is as you’d
   hope. If it’s not then proceed to the config menu and see if what you want
   can be set from there.

The config

1. The first option with this plug-in is the option to define at which point
   the comments roll up. Default is set so that all replies are hidden behind a
   click but with the drop down you could specify that replies to replies are
   hidden or replies to replies of replies and so on…
2. The next block is for controlling the titles that show above the comment
   block and the trackback block if your theme separates them out.
3. Choose the stylesheet you want to use with your theme. At the moment there
   are two, the default style for use with light coloured themes and the dark
   style for use with dark themes. You can also disable the CSS here if you’d
   rather roll it into your theme’s stylesheet. If you add more CSS files with
   the special CSS comment to the style folder in the plug-in or add a
   commenting.css to your theme’s folder then that’ll show up in this list too.
4. The comment update block lets you control the frequency of comment update
   and whether they’re enabled or not. The default status for “Auto update” is
   off, if you want to enable live commenting then check this box and set a
   time interval in the box below that is appropriate to your server/traffic
   levels. The minimum amount of time you can set for the auto update is 10
   seconds any attempt to get it quicker than that will result in it returning
   to the default value of 30 seconds.
5. The final option is to hide our credit link and is one we’d rather you
   didn’t do anything with but we’ve given you it anyway as we’re nice like
   that. We do understand that sometimes clients want things like that gone
   we’d just like to ask in return for that is that you think about signing up
   with us