[geeklog-devel] A lib-common mod to highlight newest comments

[Vincent Furia]

Rob,

Sounds like a good idea.  I think though if we do this we should do a
more thorough job and emulate Scoop and other CMSs which place "[new]"
or some similar indication next to all the comments that have been
posted since the user last viewed the article.

Although that sounds difficult, it really isn't.  All that is needed
is to keep track of when each user last viewed a story.  Then as
comments are display the indicator is placed next to comments more
recent than the last view.

It's something that I have been thinking about but putting off because
of everything else that has to be done.

-Vinny


On Tue, 5 Oct 2004 21:02:47 -0700, Rob Griffiths <robg at macosxhints.com> wrote:
> GL Team:
> 
> Below is my latest tweak to the core GL code ... driven by my desire to
> keep up better with the comments on my site.
> 
> I prefer to read comments on my site in nested mode, as I find it the
> easiest way to follow the conversations. However, what's not easy is
> finding the newest comments in nested mode, even with sort by newest.
> Obviously, this is because a new reply may be the 10th in line to a
> very old comment, which will push it down the sort order.
> 
> So I modified lib-common today to support the concept of highlighting
> the five newest hints, regardless of sort order. Now when I read
> through the comments, the five newest ones will always be visually
> called out, making them very easy to spot.
> 
> I've detailed my changes below; I would be interested in any help that
> might be provided to clean it up (in particular, it strikes me that
> building the array the way I do is somewhat redundant, but it's the
> only way I could get it to work). I would also be interested in some
> way of doing this in lib-custom, but I didn't see an easy solution
> there, especially given my lack of programming experience. I know it's
> not ideal to be setting style names in the PHP files, but again, I
> didn't see an easy way around it. Finally, this has not been tested on
> anything other than my local dev box, and then, only (so far) in nested
> mode.
> 
> Feel free to use, change, delete, etc., as you wish, but I thought I'd
> at least share the hack. Details follow...
> 
> -rob.
> 
> ===============================
> 
> Changes in lib-common.php (based on 1.3.9sr2); approximate line numbers
> provided, though they will be off based on other changes I've made.
> 
> Function COM_getComment:
> 
>   * [Line 2704] Change the first line to pass the array of newest
> comments:
> 
>     function COM_getComment( $A, $mode, $type, $order, $new_comments,
> $delete_option = false, $preview = false)
> 
>   * [line 2807] Add in the routine to check for a match between the
> current comment and the array. Insert this just
>     after the "nice_date" check:
> 
>     if ( in_array($A['cid'], $new_comments, TRUE)) {
>        $template->set_var( 'rstyle', "hidate");
>      } else {
>        $template->set_var( 'rstyle', "lodate");
>      }
> 
>   * [line 2891] Add in the array to the recursive function call:
> 
>     $retval .= COM_getComment( $A, $mode, $type, $order, $new_comments,
> $delete_option );
> 
> Now in function COM_userComments...
> 
>   * [line 2977] Add the routine to build the array of newest comments;
> insert this just below the
>     "$result = DB_query( $q )" line:
> 
>     $myquery = "select CID from {$_TABLES['comments']} WHERE sid='" .
> $sid . "' ORDER BY DATE DESC LIMIT 5";
>     $r1array  = DB_query($myquery);
>     $nrows = db_NumRows($r1array);
>     for( $i = 0; $i < $nrows; $i++ ) {
>       $r1r      = DB_fetchArray($r1array);
>       $new_comments[] = $r1r['CID'];
>     }
> 
>   * [line 2991] Add in the array of newest comments to the list of
> passed variables:
> 
>     $thecomments .= COM_getComment( $A, $mode, $type, $order,
> $new_comments,
>                                     $delete_option);
> 
> Now just create two classes, lodate and hidate, in your CSS, and place
> a call to the new variable 'rstyle' in the comment.thtml file. I've
> chosen to highlight the date, but you could obviously use the style to
> do whatever you wish with the newest comments. Here's how my date row
> looks:
> 
>    <tr><td colspan="2"><span class="{rstyle}">{date}</span></td></tr>
> 
> -rob.
> 
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