Best-Of Comments

Have you ever wanted to share your favorite comments on the front page of your site? I’m not talking about the most recent comments, or the most frequent contributors, but the best comments (most funny, most thoughtful, most appropriate, most rash – whatever your criteria may be). Now you can.

Best-Of Comments allows anyone with the ability to edit comments to mark a comment as “featured” and then featured comments will be randomly selected and displayed anywhere you choose to place the php call to best_of_comments(). You can select how comments are displayed, how many to display, and how much of a comment to display (if comments are longer than the specified word length they contain a link back to the original comment). In the future you will have the ability to limit how far in the past to look for featured comments.

Latest Version 1.2 (December 15, 2009)

Discovered a function call that allowed other plugins which alter the content to possibly interfere with the display of featured comments.

31 Comments

  2. Hi, I have installed your plug-in on my wp-blog 2.8.4, but I have some problem to mark the featured comments:

    On comment edit page, it says:
    This is currently a featured comment:
    *Feature this comment *Do not feature this comment

    But no matter what I choose among these 2 options, and click update comments, nothing happens, and the PHP call featured_comments() or best_of_comments() shows no comments at all.

    • Could you tell me which version of the plugin you are using? Also, when you try to select “Feature this comment” does it look like the radio button is filled in?

      As for the PHP calls – featured_comments does not work – that was a remnant of an earlier version of the documentation. you should only be using best_of_comments but of course it won’t show anything if the “feature this comment” option is not being saved. Let’s see if we can get that working and then see if a problem remains.

      • Thanks for the reply. I installed your plugin version 1.0 on my wordpress blog 2.8.4

        When I edit comment, both of the radio boxes are not filled in, but always display the words ‘This is currently a featured comment:’ above these radio boxes. No matter what I choose among these two options and update the comment, the next time I visit this comment edit page, non of the two radio boxes is filled in. So I guess there is a problem saving your featured mark and I don’t know how to solve.

        About the PHP call, I have figured out best_of_comments is the right one to use. Because I changed your plugin settings so that when there is no featured comments, will say ‘No Featured Comments’ in the sidebar, and this works fine.

        I do like your plugin a lot, but just in trouble to mark the ‘featured’ comments…

        • The only thing that I can think might be affecting this is a variable that I used which I didn’t really need. I have removed that from the code in version 1.1 (which I just released) so I would recommend upgrading the plugin and see if that fixes your problem.

  3. Hi!

    Works fine for me but I find that will be more useful if the plugin will could show the best comment of the post.

    If there’s no comment select of the post, no show any, if there’s some comment select show them.

    ^^ Regards and thanks for that plugin!

    • The plugin is not designed to do that right now, but I like that idea for a coming version. If you can’t wait for that there is another plugin that does that called Highlight Comments (or something like that).

  4. I agree, I’d also like to use feature comments relative to a post rather than the whole blog. I’ll keep an eye out for it.

  5. I was looking for something like this. But can you tell me whether I can make the best of comments display a page created by me?

    Thanks for the plug-in and your assistance. FYI I am using the latest WordPress 2.9.1

  6. I was looking for such a plug-in. Could you please let me know how to display best-of-comments in a separate page that I would create for my blog.

    • If you are talking about a regular WordPress Page there is not currently a way to display the best-of-comments. However, that’s a good idea and I can make a shortcode in the next version that would allow you to do that. In that case you would create a page and in the body of the page you would write [shortcode] (replacing “shortcode” with whatever I decide to name it).

  7. Thanks for the quick response. Yes, I am talking about WordPress Page. I look forward to the next version with such feature. Many thanks for this plugin.

  8. Please, how can i make to the default for every comment be “feature”. Mant thanks for the plugin and sorry i`m a newbie in wp.

    • Featuring every comment would defeat the purpose of this plugin and would require me to rewrite some code. If you would like to describe what you are trying to accomplish I might be able to point you to a suitable solution.

  9. David, first of all many thanks for the atention. Second, sorry for my poor english. But i want to make something that way: in one page the user could write/comment anonymous (and can’t read others comments) and in other page, he can read a single random comments every time he refresh the page. It’s a little strange, but it sounds a fun experience (at least for me). So i think that a plugin for hide comments and your plugin could be appropriate for this.
    Thanks

    • Sorry for the slow reply. I think I understand what you are trying to do. The best approach would probably be to use a stripped down version of my plugin that would randomly select comments for display. I’m not sure how fast I could get to it but I know what needs to be done. I’ll let you know when I get it done.

  10. Hi David- I’m a Davis County native too (living in SLC now). I just installed this plugin, but haven’t been able to figure out what code to actually place in my sidebar to make my featured comments show up. Would you mind dropping me an email so I could ask you about this? Thank you for this plugin- I’m excited to make it work.

    • I had thought my instructions were clear but as I looked at them I discovered that I had the old function call listed in my post. I hope I have not confused too many people with that. The correct call is to “best_of_comments()” and the post has been updated to reflect that.

  11. Hi David, its a delight to use your plugin. Everything has gone fine till installation but i’m stuck with the display part. the code is just not working. Its not displaying when its put up at the sidebar or on any page. If you can guide me with this i think this will be a flawless plugin 🙂

    • I would be happy to help you get it working. If you have the plugin installed and activated my first question would be, what are you doing to add the display code to the sidebar – are you editing the sidebar.php file? Also, what version of WordPress are you using?

      • David, i’m using version 3.0.1. I’ve installed the plugin and selected the comments to be displayed too. I’ve put up this code at the sidebar. Inspite of increasing the words to be displayed to 50, i get only the author name but the comment is not displaying. http://ieeeblogandtweet.com/ is the link. The plugin is getting displayed below the twitter updates bar in the sidebar

        • I can see the issue at the link you provided. I have not tested the plugin specifically with 3.0.1 – I’ll see if I can duplicate your problem and perhaps see if some of the WordPress changes are breaking things.

  12. Hi David, I’m also not able to display comments on my sidebar.. I installed plugin correctly.. selected featured comment.. and put the following code on my sidebar “{author} says: {comment}” but it does not display the featured comment.. could u help please ? thanks

    • Find comments that you would like to feature. Open the comment for editing in WordPress and select “feature this comment” in the Best-Of Comments box and click “Update.”

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