Encourage Discussions In Your Blog With These Comment Plugins

January 23, 2007 by Gaman 

In the early days of Sabahan.com, I surfed the web looking for plugins to make Sabahan.com more functional and interesting. From the findings, 10 of the plugins became my favorite. I’ve installed almost all of them in every new blogs that I’ve created.

In addition to the top 10 plugins, I am also using Google SiteMap, several SEO plugins among others.

And now it’s time to talk about another useful plugins which I’ve incorporated into Sabahan.com

These four plugins enhanced the features of your comment function. They all shares one thing in common in that they inspire conversation and encourage discussion in your blog.

1. Brian’s Threaded Comments

This plugin allows you and your readers to reply to a comment and the reply is placed inline right under the comment. A reader does not have to scroll down anymore to see if he/her question has been answered because he can look under his/her own comment.

It gives your blog a forum like feature which should increase the readability and interaction level of your blog.

After installing this plugin, I noticed that the Name, Email and URI textbox in the comment section were still shown. Usually these textbox are replaced by the “Logged in as username” text if you’ve logged in.

If you are having the same problem like me, you might want to do the following changes. Look for the following code in your comment.php file.


<small>
<?php _e('Name'); ?> <?php if ($req) _e('(required)'); ?>
</small>
<div>
<input type="text" name="author" id="author" value="<?php echo $comment_author; ?>" size="28" tabindex="1" />
</div>
<small>
<?php _e('E-mail'); ?> <?php if ($req) _e('(required - never shown publicly)'); ?>
</small>
<div>
<input type="text" name="email" id="email" value="<?php echo $comment_author_email; ?>" size="28" tabindex="2" />
</div>
<small>
<?php _e('<acronym title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</acronym>'); ?>
</small>
<div>
<input type="text" name="url" id="url" value="<?php echo $comment_author_url; ?>" size="28" tabindex="3" />
</div>

Then add the following code before this block:


<?php if ( $user_ID ) : ?>
<p>Logged in as <a class="<?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/wp-admin/profile.php"><?php echo $user_identity; ?></a>. <a class="<?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/wp-login.php?action=logout" title="<?php _e('Log out of this account') ?>">Logout »</a></p>
<?php else : ?>


And this after the block

<?php endif; ?>

2. Subscribe to Comments 2.0

Subscribe to Comments 2.0 allows a commenter to keep track of the comment discussion in a post. When a new comment is made, the commenter will receive an email notifying them about the new comments.

In Sabahan.com you can see this feature available above the comment text area where the checkbox and “Subscribe to comments via email” is at.

3. Top Commentators

Top Commentators as its title implies shows the name of the top commentators along with the number of comments made and a link back to their blog/site.

In addition to the exposure that a commentator will get, there’s no nofollow tag attached to the link so you’ll be able to enjoy a vote from Sabahan.com to your blog/site which will help in your SEO effort.

You can see the Top Commentators in action here at the left sidebar. The Top Commentators resets every month to give everyone a fair chance to become a top commentator.

4. Recent Comments

The Recent Comments plugin has been installed here for a while. It lists the most recent comments on your blog. In addition to increasing your blog page views, it’ll also encourage you readers to post a comment.