Comment

Comment Plugin lets users quickly post comments to a page without an edit/preview/save cycle.

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Features

Inserts an edit box into the page that allows users to type in and save comments. Comments can be made

• in different formats (as defined by a template),
• in both forward and reverse chronological order,
• signed or unsigned, dated or undated (as defined by a template),
• in other topics, or other positions within the current topic.

Syntax Rules

Write the command %COMMENT{ attributes }% anywhere in a TWiki topic. %COMMENT% is also legal.

The following attributes are recognized (see also additional attributes):

Name	Description
type	This is the name of the template to use for this comment. If this attribute is not defined, the type is whatever is defined by COMMENTPLUGIN_DEFAULT_TYPE, either in this topic or in your WebPreferences. By default this is 'below'.
default	Default text to put into the textarea of the prompt.
target	Name of the topic to add the comment to. Defaults to the current topic.
location	Regular expression specifying the comment location in the target topic. Read carefully below!
mode	For compatability with older versions only, synonymous with type
nonotify	Set to "on" to disable change notification for target topics
noform	Set to "on" to disable the automatic form that encloses your comment block - remember to insert <form> tags yourself! See CommentPluginExamples#noform for an example.
nopost	Set to "on" to disable insertion of the posted text into the topic.
remove	Set to "on" to remove the comment prompt after the first time it is clicked.
button	Button label text; by default Add comment.

Positioning the comment

%COMMENT supports several ways to specify where a comment should be inserted in the target topic. This is referred to as the location of the comment.

Location relative to %COMMENT tag

The default location is the %COMMENT tag itself. For example:

%COMMENT{type="below"}%

will add comments in the current topic, directly below the %COMMENT tag.

Location relative to a TWiki anchor

The target attribute may specify a web, and may also specify an anchor within the target topic; for example,

%COMMENT{type="above" target="%MAINWEB%.PersonalRemarks#InsertHere"}%

This uses a standard TWiki in-topic anchor as the insertion location. See TextFormattingRules for more about TWiki anchors.

Location relative to an arbitrary text string

Getting more sophisticated, you can also specify a regular expression for the target location using the location parameter. The target topic is searched for the regular expression, and the comment inserted relative to the string that the search matched. For example,

%COMMENT{type="above" location="Flights of Fancy"}%

will place comments above the first occurrence of the string Flights of Fancy in the current topic.

Warning of course, if a user's comment contains the string "Flights of Fancy" they may and up changing the location for the next comment! Also, if you use a tag in the location, then you've just inserted another tag in the page that contains the %COMMENT! So be very careful how you specify the RE for location. Note that the RE is matched using perl "multiple line" mode, so ^ and $ match the start of a line and the end of a line respectively.

I look forward to someone leveraging this feature to create - for example - threaded conversations using %COMMENT.

If you specify an anchor and a location, the anchor will be ignored.

Default templates

Templates are used to define the "comment style" i.e. how comments appear in the page. The default is to add comments in "Blog like" style using bulleted lists, with the most recent comment at the top, but many other styles are available such as tables or Wiki thread mode comments. It is easy to define your own customer styles as well.

A set of default comment templates are shipped with the plugin. These are:

Template type	Description
top	Comments, signed and dated (server time), added at top of the topic (the anchor is ignored)
bottom	Comments, signed and dated (server time), added at end of the target topic (the anchor is ignored)
above	Comments, signed and dated (server time), added immediately before the target anchor, or the %COMMENT if no anchor is specified
below	Comments, signed and dated (server time), added immediately below the target anchor, or the %COMMENT if no anchor is specified
threadmode	Wiki thread mode comment, signed and dated (server time)
tableprepend	Comments, signed and dated (server time), formatted as an HTML table row, added below the anchor (which must be in an HTML <table>)
tableappend	Comments, signed and dated (server time), formatted as an HTML table row, added above the anchor (which must be in an HTML <table>)

Providing attribute values

If an attribute is given to the %COMMENT tag that is not one of the standard attributes, then that attribute is taken as the name of a parameter to be expanded in the PROMPT template. Expressions in the template of the form %param|default% (e.g. %rows|3%, %button|Push me%) are expanded to the values given in the %COMMENT. For example, if the PROMPT template 'example' contains:

<textarea rows=%rows|3% cols="%cols|50%" value="%tval|Rubbish%">

and the %COMMENT tag is:

%COMMENT{type="example" cols="75"}%

then the template will be expanded as

<textarea rows="3" cols="75" value="Rubbish">

Special variables

As well as support for all the usual TWiki variables in templates, the following special variables are supported in the PROMPT definition:

Variable	Description
%DISABLED%	Set to 'disabled' when you cannot comment (e.g. in preview mode).
%MESSAGE%	The text specified by default. This may be overridden by a helpful message when the prompt is DISABLED.

This Topic Is Referenced By These Topics:
Related Links: HelpIndex

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-- JimCrum - 20 Feb 2008