One of the good things about WordPress is that it is continually being improved. Unfortunately this conflicts with one of the other good things about it – the large amount of third party support. That is, when WordPress releases a new feature, you often find that it conflicts in some way with a third-party feature you are already using.
So, today’s source of irritation is threaded comments. WordPress now supports them. I want to test them. But doing so requires me to mess with the existing theme for this site. Also the updated comment code appears to conflict with the comment preview system.
So, for now, no previews (and it was buggy anyway), but we do have threaded comments. I’m going to test the system on this post so you’ll see how it works. Assuming it does, you can have a play too.
Here I am commenting on this post.
And this, with any luck, appears as a reply to the first comment.
And so on, but not quite ad infinitum because the layout has a limited width. Currently I’m allowing up to 5 levels of nesting.
This is a separate comment on the main post.
…and this is my comment on your 2nd comment. How’s it working so far?
Well, as you can see, it works. But whether it is useful or not is another matter.
Oh dear. I remember having to hack one of my themes from scratch to support the new commenting system. So annoying. The old commenting system still exists though. I gave up on the whole thing.
I’m commenting from the iPhone version of your blog, and it hasna got threading. (Neither does mine, and I don’t think there’s support in the plugin’s theme for that. It’s already got a ton of neat stuff, besides….)
Thanks. I’d forgotten about the mobile theme. That could be a problem. There is a new version out, so I’ll go check it, but I’ll be surprised if they have support for threading.
OK, so the mobile theme still doesn’t support threading. I’m not sure how annoying this will be for people. The support forums at BraveNewCode are down for maintenance right now, so I can’t ask about this, but in the process I did discover Developer Mode in Safari which is teh awesome.
In search of a different option for comment previews I took a look at what Scalzi was using on Whatever. It seems to work, so I’m giving it a trial.
But now the subscribe to comments box appears to have vanished. *sigh*
Ah, no it hasn’t, it just doesn’t appear if you are logged in to the admin interface. Isn’t software fun?
I’m curious to know if you automate the crossposting of entries here to LJ 🙂 I use wordpress too as well as LJ
Yes, I do. There’s a plug in.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lj-xp/
Personally I find threaded formats where I can’t control the threading (a la a Usenet newsreader; I liked tin) to be unbelievably annoying. Either I want to control my own threading choices, or I want linearity.
Not that you’re soliciting votes, I know.
I suspect I will end up agreeing with you. Threaded comments seem great in theory, but are much less effective in practice, especially for very active comment threads.