Plugin facts
- Demand loading of comments
- Low overhead
- Customizable to work with many themes
- includes Ajax-powered comment preview and posting features.
- no dependencies on jQuery or other big framework.
- degrades nicely for users browsing your site without JavaScript.
- No custom database queries or table changes are necessary. Everything is handled via standard WordPress APIs.
- Open source, GPL licensed.
WP-AjaxCM settings page
AjaxCM - spice up your comments
WP-AjaxCM is a new WordPress plugin, currently under development, with the goal of enhancing the commenting system with some Ajax features. It is designed to be lightweight, customizable to work with many different themes and does not change the behavior of your blog when visited without JavaScript (i.e. spiders will see the standard comment paging links, so the plugin should not affect your search engine rating).
It provides the following features:
- Ajax-powered comment paging with true demand loading of comments to reduce server load.
- Ajax-powered comment posting with a preview function.
- Ajax-powered searching and filtering of comments.
The ajax-pager provides two modes of operation:
- Classic page numbers like the standard WordPress comment pagination works.
- A more simple paging method that only provides links to the previous and next page(s) of comments. This is consistent with the way the Twenty Eleven theme works.
It allows you to customize the plugin to match your theme's default paging behavior for comments. The configuration also allows to set the CSS classes for the dynamically generated pagination.
What's different, why another plugin?
Simple. I felt a need for it. There are a number of Ajax-enhancements for the comments system in WordPress, but none of them actually did everything I wanted to see in such a plugin. Some of these plugins simply load all comments and use some jQuery magic to divide them into pages, others are unmaintained for a long time and do no longer work with WordPress 3.x.
WP-AjaxCM does not pre-load all comments for a given post or page, instead it only loads one page of comments, sends them through wp_list_comments() to format them and then replaces the currently visible list of comments with the new page.
Availability and download
Currently, the plugin is in development and no download is yet available. If you want to check it out, you can browse this site and find a couple of longer threads to see the AJAX pager in action. Here are two examples:
I expect a first public release later this year.