MetaCommentPlugin

This is YACS (yet another comment system) which tries

• (a) to be easy to use
• (b) to scale up to lots of comments
• (c) to provide different layouts and commenting requirements

MetaCommentPlugin allows to easily add commenting to any topic. Discussiosn can either be displayed in linear or threaded mode. Different comment styles and layouts can easily be created and switched from one to the other. Comments can be edited and deleted inline easily. Commenting can be enabled independently from the normal change access rights to a topic while they are still stored as meta data to a topic. That way a keyword search matching on different comments of the same discussion will generate a hit on the discussion itself in a natural way.

Note, that this plugin is in alpha state as some features are still missing:

• implement an approval system
• implement a RECENTCOMMENTS macro to display a list of all activities in a forum
• extend METACOMMENT to display/suppress comments that are approved/need approvement

Screenshot

%IMAGE{"MetaCommentSnap1.jpeg" type="simple"}%

Data Model

Each comment is stored into a META:COMMENT field of a topic with properties

• name: id of the comment, used in ref for threaded comments
• author: WikiName of the author of this comment
• date: timestamp when this comment was created
• modified: timestamp when this comment was last modified
• ref: name of another comment within the same thread this comment is a subcomment of
• text: the comment text
• title: title text of this comment

Syntax

METACOMMENT

Renders a discussion on a given topic

%METACOMMENT{
  topic="..."
  ...
}%

Parameters:

• topic: the topic to render the discussion for, defaults to the current topic
• header: string prepended to the output
• footer: string appended to the output
• format: format string used to render each comment, defaults to

  $title

  $text
• template: template to be used instead of the inline format parameter
• separator: separats the list of comments
• subheader: string prepended to the list of subcommnets, defaults to <div class='cmtSubComments'>
• subfooter: string appended to the list of subcommnets, defaults to </div
• subformat: format string used for subcomments, defaults to the value of the format parameter
• ref: only list comments that are a subcomments of the given comment
• skip: number of comments to skip in the list, useful for pagination
• limit: maximum number of comments to list, useful for pagination
• singular: title used when only one comment is present, defaults to One comment
• plural: title when there are more than one comment, defaults to "$count comments
• mindate: minimum date of a comment to be displayed
• maxdate: maximum date of a comment to be displayed
• threaded: switch on/off threaded rendering, comments will be rendered recursively

RECENTCOMMENTS

todo

Installation Instructions

You do not need to install anything in the browser to use this extension. The following instructions are for the administrator who installs the extension on the server.

Open configure, and open the "Extensions" section. Use "Find More Extensions" to get a list of available extensions. Select "Install".

If you have any problems, or if the extension isn't available in configure, then you can still install manually from the command-line. See http://foswiki.org/Support/ManuallyInstallingExtensions for more help.

Info