Taming Long Comment Lists

Information: We believe paged commenting will work in earlier versions of b2evolution, but we've only tested it in 1.6 alpha and 1.7 cvs. If you find that it works in an earlier version, please let us know so that we can update this article. Thank! :D

Does your blog receive lots of comments? If so, you're probably tired of scrolling down the screen each time you want see the newest comments. ( We know we are. :p ) Tame your long list of comments by paging them.

This skin modification will help you get control over lots of comments by putting them into pages. You can control the following:

• Number of comments per page.
• Sort order (New-to-old or old-to-new).
• Styling and/or number of page controls.

The way it works is simple. Your comments appear, as normal, until they exceed your "number of comments per page". When they go over, a comment page is added, with page controls (i.e., newer comments | older comments ). The controls appear where you place them and we've added hooks so that you can style them to your liking in your CSS file. The code includes an internal bookmark, so when you scroll through pages of comments, each new page starts at the "top of comments" (rather than "top of entry"), which makes reading multiple pages of comments easier. We have also included an optional, easy core hack to keep view counts from incrementing for comment pages, should this be something you need.

To implement paged comments for your blog, follow the detailed instructions & use the cut'n-paste code on the next page. After you're finished installing, you'll likely want to style the page controls, which is covered on page 3 (CSS Styling), including some suggested CSS declarations. The last page (FAQs and Enhancements) discusses any questions we've received about paged comments and additional ways to make paged comments nicer.