With the public release of WordPress 2.7, end users now have the ability to enable threaded conversations to take place on their blog. However, your theme must support this ability before you can turn them on. Within this article, I’ll highlight a few examples that can give you inspiration if you decide to style the way threaded comments appear on your site. Also, I’ll provide a few links as resources for more help on configuring threaded comments.
First up, Revolution 2. The following is a screenshot of the Revolution 2 Church Theme. This type of threaded comment design and layout has been applied to all of Brian’s themes.
One of the coolest implementations of threaded comments in WordPress 2.7 I have seen is on CDHarrison.com. By the way, he also has written a great post detailing the CSS classes that need to be added to a theme in order to style the way in which comments are displayed. Usually the Reply link is just that, a link. In this example, it’s more like a button.
Tarski is a free theme that now has support for threaded comments. This design is minimal in nature and also has a styled reply link.
Just Tadlock has announced that all of his themes now support comment threading with the exception of the Bliss theme. The following screenshot is how threaded comments look within the Hybrid Theme.
Maybe you’re looking for that white and gray look? Evening Sun by Spectacu.la should fit the bill.
Aeros 1.0.5 created by TheBuckMaker. A pretty extensible theme which now has threaded comment support.
The following screenshot is taken from the eVid theme which is part of the elegantthemes theme club. You can’t get it for free but you can be inspired by it.
Resources:
WordPress 2.7 Comment Enhancements
WordPress 2.7 Comment Style Starter 1
WordPress 2.7 Comment Style Starter 2
WordPress 2.7 Theme Enhancements Part 3 – Threaded Comments Edition
Make Threaded Comments Compatible With Versions Of WordPress Earlier Than 2.7
Conclusion:
While I had a really difficult time styling threaded comments on my own blog, the images shown within this post clearly demonstrate that it’s possible to control the look and feel of the way in which threaded comments are displayed. With more documentation being released and more people sharing their tips and strategies, I think I may go back in and give it another shot.
Will you be using threaded comments on your WordPress 2.7 installation? Know of any other great resources or design inspiration for threaded comments? Share them in the comments.
11 thoughts on “7 Great Examples Of WordPress Threaded Comments”
My replies are overlapping the next comment.
Like this.
testing
Thanks for the info. I just realized that WordPress 2.7 is supporting threated comment. I will edit all themes I used for my blogs soon.
I am using TheBuckMaker theme, so I already have it implemented.
Glad the little bit of work I did is being found useful by others. I really dig the new nested comments feature in WordPress 2.7 and just wanted to add the feature to my own theme. I figured what I learned might help others…
Three cheers to all those programmers who are toiling hard to make this possible. i think this is a much needed hack which almost every wp blogger (including me) would like to have.
Karan @ Auto Life House
Jeff, don’t miss my breakdown of the HTML and CSS classes: http://www.wp-fun.co.uk/2008/12/10/27-comment-classes/
I am using Brian Gardener’s theme, so I already have it implemented; but, I am working on re-styling comments to make them look better.
It’s worth mentioning that with Evening Sun, once you get past two levels of commenting it switches into an animated Javascript based mode which stops you getting interminably long threads cluttering up the comments section of a post.
We’re going to refine the idea further in time.
Anyway, thanks for listing us here – an honour indeed 🙂
Using the new CSS classes helps too. For example there’s a CSS class that tells you the depth — you can have all top level comments color A and children comments color B all without messing around with “ul lu { … }”.
Thanks for the mention of the Hybrid theme, Jeff. Right now, theme developers are trying to get a grasp of threaded comments as much as you are.
The easy part is the structure of the comment nesting. The tough part happens when you start alternating background colors, styling post author comments, and such because once you change something about a particular comment, every comment reply below it in the hierarchy inherits that style. That just gets messy. Then, the code can start getting bloated and confusing.
If you give it another shot yourself, start with the important stuff — width, margin, and padding. Once you’ve got that down, you can then start styling.
I’m not certain if I’ll implement threaded comments on my main blog. I’m testing them out on one of my sites at the moment to get a feel for them.
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