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Plugin Description
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.
Screenshots
Will work on both dark and light themes thanks to alternative stylesheet
accessible from the control interface.
The control interface for this plug-in.
