Threaded Comments!

I’ve been hacking away at the website; I implemented nested comments for all the blogs, thanks to this Wordpress plugin (with a few changes). You can get started right away; every comment you see should say “REPLY TO THIS” below it, and if you click that, you can thread your comment right below the original. The great thing about this is the original poster will be automatically emailed your new comment, which really contributes to the social aspect of thripp.com. Not only that, but all commenting is AJAX now and the reply buttons open a form right below the comment through JavaScript.

If the blog is yours, you can delete comments right from any post; there’s a button next to each reply link.

I was looking at some of the built-in restrictions in Wordpress MU, and I wasn’t liking them. I don’t understand why blog and user names can’t have hyphens, capital letters, or be shorter than four characters. So I edited wpmu-functions.php and wp-signup.php to give you freedom. You can register blog names with hyphens, usernames with capital letters (not blogs, because the URI would have caps in it then), and they can be as short as one character. I’m leaving the requirement that blog and user names must have letters (not all numbers), so I can use those short URIs for myself if needed. For one-character names, I only took “-” and “x” for myself; there are twenty-five other letters open. Register one now (provided you’ll be active) and you can own a piece of Internet history. Someone complained about the ban on hyphens in the Wordpress MU trac, but it was dismissed.

What else? I added some handy links to the home page’s side-bar; you can see RSS feeds for the whole network, or visit a random blog. If you have a blog, log in to the admin area; the navigation menu uses CSS drop-down menus, so you can get around quickly. Bloggers can use the Simple Tags plugin now, which is great for its tag auto-completion, and I re-wrote all the plugin descriptions to give you advice and help you implement them. If you read the opening post, you know the modules offered allow you to cross post your thripp.com blog entries to LiveJournal, Xanga, Facebook, and Twitter, automatically and with ease.

That’s it for now! These are some big changes, and they’ll undoubtedly add to the devlopment of the community.