Deprecating Brian’s Threaded Comments
Brian's Threaded Comments are now officially driftwood.
They've been badly maintained for a while, but now it's official.
There's no need to maintain the plugin anymore, since WordPress has now built-in threaded comments that are very similar to mine, which work with themes and plugins and don't require you to mess around with your comments.php and all the other cumbersome stuff.
If you need threaded comments, I suggest you upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, and turn them on. They should be compatible with the data generated by Brian's Threaded Comments, so it should be a smooth transition.
It seems they don't migrate smoothly, so I'll have to look into migrating the data.
I won't rule out that the plugin might be resurrected later on, if I find that I have something unique to offer, but for now it's dead.
Thanks to everyone who downloaded and used the plugin.
As a point of note, you actually do have to deal with cumbersome updating of your comments.php, especially if you have a custom theme which was made prior to 2.7.
Sure, that is the price of progression, and once you've migrated, future updates will be simpler, but I personally think WordPress' implementation was rather heavy handed. Instead of being able to customize comments in depth, everythign is replaced by a simple "wp_list_comments" function which outputs as a proxy from a core system file.
Meaning; if I want to move the commentbox to the bottom of a thread I want to reply to, I have to make javascript and CSS hacks.
So the WordPress implementation is not as elegant as you allude to.
Thanks for that input.
I'll investigate at some point if there's anything that can be done about that, but for now I think adoption of threaded-sensitive themes is more likely to happen when it's part of the core, than a plugin.
Brian,
Been using your excellent threaded comments plugin for years. Thank you. It greatly improved the conversation at my blog.
However, though I am running the latest version of WordPress, I've been testing theme previews of threaded-comment-compatible themes, but I cannot get any of my comments to thread. I turned the feature on in settings>discussion and disabled your plugin, but no go.
Is there some trick to getting WordPress to thread comments that were done in your plugin?
Eek – it seems I am wrong then. I'll have to look into that and remove the wrong information from the post :/ Sorry about that.
Hey,
Thanks for writing the plugin. Have you had any success with the migration issue? I am unable to uninstall it at present because of what happens to the comments once it has been disabled.
Regards
James
same here!
Hey Guys –
I just deactivated the plugin on a blog that I recently was upgraded to 2.8.3, and then enabled threaded comments in settings->discussion, and it worked like a charm. I'm not really sure how it could not work – from what I saw in my (very cursory) glance in the db, the core threaded comments functionality uses the same db structure as the plugin?
I was worried about the migration of the comment threads myself, but guess what? I didn't need to do any migration at all on the data! So you were right initially—both data from your plugin and core WP ARE compatible.
The issue I see is more on the way comments.php file handles itself. I was glad that my theme is a modified version of the Default theme that comes with WP. All I did was to copy the comments.php codes from the Default to my theme, disable the thread plugin, and go to Discussions to enable threading.
I'm also having issues migrating to the new wp native threaded comments. Please let me know if anyone has had any success with this.
Hello….thanks for updating information about….the plugin….i didnt faced any issue with that…yet…migration was fine….
hi brian, my blog has been upgraded to 3.0, I've tried to 'reply comment' and it's not working.
i was using your great plugin for many years. just want to say thank you :)
after my update to wp3.0 it wont work anymore. deactivate it and use the wp-function instead wont work in the first place. no comments showed up.
the problem was the old theme i use. i must modify the code of the comment.php. very helpfull was this tutorial, maybe someone other will find it helpfull too:
http://bavotasan.com/tutorials/how-to-add-nested-comments-to-your-wordpress-theme/
thanks again for your good work!
greetings from germany,
mortek