I turned on the commenting feature on Geeks In Love.
That’s all I wanted to inform you about.
But…you might be wondering why the commenting feature wasn’t on to begin with. After all, isn’t commenting a basic feature of blogging packages like WordPress?
If you’re that curious, and since according to some people, I’m somewhat of a geek, I will use this opportunity to explain, and to give you some insight into the design of Geeks In Love’s interface.
It turns out that to get the user-experience I wanted for GIL, I had to subvert the manner in which WordPress functions in a fundamental way. Normally, you get an index page (the main page), that shows a whole bunch of posts, like on sknoblog, and when you go to a single post, you see just that post, followed by the commenting fields.
But I wanted no visible difference between the index page and the individual post pages, because I wanted the reader to be able to flip through the cartoons without a paradigm change.
And I wanted a feature that you normally only get on single post pages to show up on the index page. I wanted the links to the previous/next posts to show the title of these previous or next posts, instead of simply showing « previous » or « next ».
That wasn’t possible without hacking the WordPress index.php template to trick it into thinking it was in single-post mode.
But that broke the commenting feature!
But since those damn comment fields would have marred my interface, and distracted from the drawings, I left it at that.
A pure case of Function Follows Form evil. I know. Bad. Very bad.
But yesterday, I remembered the commenting in WordPress could be done in a pop-up, which would allow me to keep my interface the way it is, if I could get the comments to work. So I mucked around until I found the .php file that contains all the commenting functions, and found the bit of code where that same darn single-post variable was disrupting things, and I commented-it out (appropriately enough).
So now I can have my UI cake and comment on it too.
There you have it. So did your eyes glaze over or did your nipples get hard?