Enhancing comments

For the benefit of the few visitors who leave notes here, I’ve made use of a handful of plugins intended to make commenting easier. One of these plugins, however, hasn’t played well with some of the other kids in the WordPress playground: this would be TinyMCEComments, the popular WYSIWYG editor that allows visitors to format their comments without laboriously keying in styling tags. It’s been extremely valuable; it’s also been a pain because its operation conflicts with certain other comment function plugins, as well as the nested comments feature in the current iteration of WordPress. One big problem is that the MCE plugin renames the comment area, as I understand it, which leaves other plugins and functions essentially asking “Where’s Waldo?”

The value of visual editing for comments is great, and I found myself having to choose which child to keep and which to sell off for medical experiments. That is, I chose to continue using TinyMCEComments while forsaking the use of other, potentially useful features.

That all came to an end when, in a scowly and problem-solving frame of mind, I set about looking for an alternative. I found one in Chad Coleman’s WMD Editor plugin, which immediately resolved the conflicts which plagued me by using the Markdown language – not problematic TinyMCE – to provide HTML editing in the comment area.

WMD Editor worked right out of the box, and seems to play nicely with others. This has enabled me to finally make use of WordPress’ nested comments. Other features may be invited to the party now that TinyMCEComments has been kicked to the curb.

This is an example of the conflicts that can arise between bits of programming authored by various people who may not place a priority on making their plugins compatible with others – or with WordPress itself. I was fortunate this time around; in the future, however, I may need to rely on my own actual programming knowledge.

Guess I’d better get some, eh?