O2 Plugin Request: The Final Word

For a little while on the Community Team we have been discussing how useful it would be to have a ‘top comment’ feature on O2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. that would allow us to sum up a thread with a single comment. This would be similar to the ‘accepted answer’ function that you see on Stack Exchange and other support forums where one reply is highlighted and shown at the top of the comment thread. It’s great for long discussion threads and anything that requires a final decision (as a lot of our discussions on the Community P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. do).

In order to make this happen, I built a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party called The Final Word (Plugin Directory / GitHub) that works with O2 to provide this functionality. I have opened a ticket for including this plugin that contains some screenshots of what this would look like.

The features of this plugin include:

  • Marking a chosen comment as the ‘top comment’
  • The top comment is displayed at the top of the comment list with a ‘view in context’ anchor link
  • The top comment is also highlighted in context in the thread
  • Only one comment can be selected as the top comment
  • The top comment flag can be removed
  • Only users who are able to edit the post can select a top comment
  • Includes basic styling for top comments

It’s worth noting that there is nothing in the plugin that will conflict with any existing features on Make and it barely adds any additional technical overhead, so if it is only used by a handful of teams, then the other teams won’t be negatively affected.

Assuming this is accepted and can be added to the Make blogs, the only additional code that we might need to add would be some additional CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. for the top comment styling. I purposefully built the CSS included the plugin to be very generic, so it may need some slight tweaking for the Make network. I would test this out locally, but the MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. Environment has not yet been updated to include O2, so I can’t do this effectively.

Thanks to @ocean90 for an initial code review, as well as @pento for some general pointers with regards to extending O2.

Also pinging @coreymckrill and @iandunn about this.