WordPress 2.7 has been officially released! It was only a few days ago that I wrote about the first WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate, so congrats to everyone on the dev team (literally hundreds of people) for the quick release! It appears the WordPress team is now publicly giving the releases their own code name, with this latest release being called “Coltrane”. (As far as I know, this is something new, but I could be mistaken.) For those who know the Simpsons like they know their own family (I don’t), you may be aware that Coltrane was the Simpsons’ fourth cat (and of course we can’t forget John Coltrane, the American jazz saxophonist to whom the release is really dedicated).
Posts Tagged: WordPress
Moved comment and date underneath post title
In attempt to fix a slight usability issue with this blogs’ theme that caused the post comments link to appear that it might belong to the previous post, I moved the comments and date line underneath the post title (as opposed to above it) and adjusted the spacing to bring the two closer together.
Installed WP Super Cache
I installed WP Super Cache on this blog as a drop-in replacement for WP-Cache (which I disabled because of compatibility issues with PHP5). After enabling WP Super Cache and turning on the Super Cache Compression option, I can see a huge improvement in page load times. A page I always use for testing is the Archives page, which normally executes almost 2,000 SQL queries. Without the cache plugin, that page took almost 5 seconds to load. Now it loads in less than 2 seconds.
WordPress 2.7 RC1: A Preview of What’s Coming
I’m following WordPress on Twitter and I was excited to see a recent tweet that WordPress 2.7, Release Candidate 1 had been released. I was very curious to see if comment threading was added or if it had been dropped since Automattic’s acquisition of IntenseDebate a few months ago. (I’m sure I could have gotten an answer to that by poking around on the WordPress Trac, but it wasn’t that important.) Yesterday, I wrote about how I decided not to outsource my comments to IntenseDebate so if you read that post you’ll understand why I’m excited about the possibility of native comment threading.
For testing WP 2.7 RC1, I decided to upgrade an existing blog that I set up a few months ago, but that I haven’t launched yet. My first impression upon seeing the new WordPress Dashboard? Wow. It’s amazingly different (but in a good way). Oh, and there is native comment threading support!
I’ve included some screenshots below, including the Discussion Settings where you can see the new options for comment threading and Avatars. Also, I also did a quick threaded comments test using the default WordPress theme, which you can see at the end. Enjoy!
And for the finale, comment threading!
Not Outsourcing my Comments to IntenseDebate
I’ve been hearing a lot about IntenseDebate recently, in various blog posts and news sites (they were acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress, back in September). IntenseDebate is basically a set of tools that allows for enhanced commenting on your blog or website. Two features that caught my attention were Comment Threading and Reply-by-email.
Comment Threading was of particular interest to me because I find that being able to respond directly to a specific comment keeps the comments organized and relevant. Normally the way you respond directly to a comment without threading support is to prefix your reply with the persons name (e.g., “@raamdev That’s a great idea!”), but constantly searching the list of comments for the comment being replied to gets tiresome.
I don’t really have enough comment traffic on this blog to deal with the aforementioned problem on a regular basis, but I decided to install the IntenseDebate WordPress plugin to see how easily I could integrate it. I was impressed with how smoothly the process went. All my old comments (1,300+) were synced to IntenseDebate and there was nothing I needed to change on my theme templates — the entire commenting system was replaced with IntenseDebate’s commenting system, with threading support, a comment reputation point system, and all those other fancy features.
In the end, however, I decided to deactivate the plugin. I didn’t like that my comments were being loaded from an outside source, which both increased the average load time for each page and added yet another dependency on an external service. (In contrast, my Twitter sidebar uses Twitter Tools, which actually syncs tweets to the same database as WordPress and loads them from there. Dependency problems solved! To be fair though, the IntenseDebate plugin maintains a copy of all the comments in the WordPress database, just in case you decide to stop using it.) Customizing the look and feel of the comments also meant modifying CSS through my IntenseDebate account and right from the start I felt the need to customize and make the comment system less “busy” and self-advertising. There were no themes to choose from either. Ugh.
While doing all this thinking about the disadvantages of outsourcing my comments, I came across a post on Robert Nystorm’s blog where he decides to literally outsource all of his comments. Instead of having any form of commenting system, he simply provides a link to reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon where he encourages people post their comments on his post. His rationale behind this is that people already use these other sites for commenting and those commenting systems are specifically tuned to handle comments. If you can’t beat’em, join’em.
But that’s extreme. Although I can sympathize with some of Robert’s frustration, I think a commenting system, even if only a simple one, is important. While some people may be familiar with reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon, not everyone will use those sites regularly or, for that matter, want to go through the trouble of creating an account just to post a comment.
Back in September, I wrote about how excited I was to hear that Comment Threading was coming in WordPress 2.7. I hope the features and functionality of IntenseDebate are somehow integrated into WordPress down the road, instead of indefinitely relying on an external service to provide the same functionality.
