WordPress Plugin to Highlight Best Comments?

April 18, 2008 7:18 PM

I run a couple of WordPress blogs. Sometimes a reader will leave an excellent comment. I would love to find a plugin (or an easy method) to highlight these great comments, similar to the way AskMe highlights best answers. I can't figure out how to do this. Do you have any suggestions?

Just to be clear, I'm not really looking for a "karma" type plugin in which users choose best comments. I want to choose the best comments, which would then create some sort of flag that would trigger alternate CSS formatting. If there's a karma plugin that allows this (while disabling user karma), that's good.

posted by jdroth to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Not a plugin solution, but you could add some CSS to your template that produces the desired effect, then simply wrap the good comments in a div.

So I'd add to my stylesheet the appropriate rules:

#bestcomment {
background-color:green;
}

The edit the comment so that it read:

<div class="bestcomment">
Original comment
</div>

A plugin would be easier, but this would work.
posted by chrisamiller at 7:34 PM on April 18

Chris, actually a great idea. it does take a little work on my part, but it's easy enough to implement. And the fact that I have to do a little hand-editing would keep me from doing it too liberally. Thanks.
posted by jdroth at 10:12 PM on April 18

I'll pass along the advice that Teresa Nielsen Hayden passed along to me:

Cherish your good commenters. When one of them says something smart, promote it to the front page. Everyone wins.

posted by deCadmus at 6:35 AM on April 19

I think this does what you're looking for.
posted by WCityMike at 9:32 AM on April 19 [1 favorite]

chrisamiller's solution would work great with a blog like Moveable Type, where it spits out static HTML pages. But Wordpress pulls posts and comments out of the database every time a page is requested (well, except for any caching that may happen), so there would be nowhere for you to pop in a manually edit any html. Gotta be a plugin. Looks like WCMike has one for you?
posted by misterbrandt at 12:25 PM on April 19

Misterbrandt -- I can edit a poster's comment to use the HTML in question. I think. WP may actually restrict which HTML elements are allowed... WCityMike's plugin is good, but doesn't actually do what I'm after. It assigns styles based on various commenter attributes, but doesn't give me a way to say "this is the best comment"
posted by jdroth at 2:20 PM on April 19

Here's an example of using chrisamiller's inline DIV solution.
posted by jdroth at 2:34 PM on April 19

(Oh, and deCadmus, I do try to highlight some great comments on the front page. I agree -- everyone wins.)
posted by jdroth at 2:34 PM on April 19