Feeds for comments

[julien]

Hello

I'm not myself a user of pixelpost, but a frequent reader of photoblogs powered by pixelpost. And there's one thing I thought was missing in pixelpost: RSS and Atom feeds for comments. So I tackled the problem and made the necessary modifications :-)

If you want to offer this functionnality to your readers, you can find all the code and explanations for using it in this post on my blog.

The code has been working fine on a friend's photoblog for nearly two months now, but as I don't have a deep understanding of pixelpost code, I probably have overlooked some easier way to offer this functionnality. So don't hesitate to comment on this code.

Regards,

julien

[riken]

Could you also provide this as a set of changed files, for those of us who are forced to use Windows at work instead of a sane OS like linux.

Also, without having seen the code, couldn't you do this as an addon? Addons are always more preferable than hacks.

[julien]

OK, the post on my blog has been updated to provide the changed files. (Sidenote: I also work on Windows, but thanks to Cygwin I can use without any problems tools like patch and diff. ;-) )

It could (and should) probably be done as an addon. But when I started on it, I couldn't find any documentation on the way addons work. So I took the easy way. But now that I found said documentation, I'm not sure I would have been able to provide the same level of functionnality with an addon (namely, it might prove difficult to provide permalinks pointing to a precise comment with an addon, for this I had to modify the function displaying the comments in functions.php).

[riken]

Originally Posted by julien

OK, the post on my blog has been updated to provide the changed files. (Sidenote: I also work on Windows, but thanks to Cygwin I can use without any problems tools like patch and diff. ;-) )

Didn't think of Cygwin. Not sure if I care enough to download and install it though.

Originally Posted by julien

It could (and should) probably be done as an addon. But when I started on it, I couldn't find any documentation on the way addons work. So I took the easy way. But now that I found said documentation, I'm not sure I would have been able to provide the same level of functionnality with an addon (namely, it might prove difficult to provide permalinks pointing to a precise comment with an addon, for this I had to modify the function displaying the comments in functions.php).

You're not using the function you modified to produce the feeds anyway. Instead you're just calling the db directly.

I've looked over the code and you could very easily turn this into an addon. Then it will be compatible with 1.4.2 and other future versions. Just take the code that makes the feeds, put them in a seperate file and add the addon variables.

[julien]

Originally Posted by riken

You're not using the function you modified to produce the feeds anyway. Instead you're just calling the db directly.

That's normal, as it's the function that display comments in the themes. It has to be modified, so as to have in the comments page a unique ID for each comment. I then use this ID as a permalink in the feed. (This allows to go directly to the given comment on the web page from the displayed feed in the aggregator. Very useful for long pages of comments.)

(Sorry for my awful english tonight, I'm a bit too tired to look out for grammatical errors. I hope I can still make myself understood...)