Applying CommentPress to Existing & Syndicated Posts

@mburtis – can you post a link? If you’d prefer, you can email it to me directly at [email protected]

Cheers,

Christian

Thought I’d quickly add that, in short, any styling of post content – ie anything not done by wp_autop() – will most likely break parsing of content. This should be more robust in the next update, FWIW, but I know that doesn’t help you much right now.

Hi Christian,

My apologies for not responding to your response sooner! I left it right before leaving on winter break, and only just now saw your response.

The site can be found at https://oliproposals.umwblogs.org and a specific example of a post that isn’t working properly with CommentPress can be seen at https://oliproposals.umwblogs.org/2012/07/16/econ-201-principles-of-macroeconomics/.

I’m not familiar with wp_autop(). I assume it runs upon post save/update? Since these posts are syndicated, they aren’t created through the editor — they’re just added directly to the database upon syndication. Could this be the reason why they CP isn’t working with them?

In the case of older, existing posts, however, I have gone in and edited the posts in order to see if updating them triggers whatever needs to happen. In those cases, CP still doesn’t work.

Hi Martha,

It looks like whatever it is that does the syndication is not creating properly formatted post content. The specific URL you posted has an ordered list wrapped in a paragraph tag, for example. And none of the subsequent paragraphs are actually being wrapped in <p> tags (this is what wp_autop() does) which is why CommentPress cannot identify them.

When I create a new post with your markup, I too see that WordPress fails to wrap subsequent paragraphs in <p> tags. But when I remove the <p> tags that enclose the <ol>, everything then seems to work as expected. Bear in mind that because you are using <!--commentblock--> quicktags in the content, the individual paragraphs cannot be commented on – only the “blocks” that those tags demarcate.

On other pages, I notice that your basic paragraph text is being wrapped in <div> tags, which CommentPress does not parse as something that can be commented on. If you remove those, you may find that all’s well.

I’d suggest debugging the syndication code so that it inserts valid markup in the first place – otherwise WordPress (let alone CommentPress) will struggle with it.

Best wishes,

Christian

Christian,

Thanks so much for the feedback. I think I might also be able to write the function to run wp_autop() on incoming syndicated post — there is a hook in the syndication plugin for processing incoming content, so that might work.

But this definitely gives me some ideas of where to start looking.

Best,
Martha

Unfortunately that’s unlikely to work, Martha. wp_autop is applied by WordPress to content on display via the_content and the_excerpt filters, unless you specify otherwise. What you need to ensure is that the raw post/page markup is valid HTML – or produces valid HTML when filtered by wp_autop. Depending on your sources, this may need the intervention of a human, since it is notoriously difficult to correct code programmatically. GIGO, as they say.

As a general rule, what CommentPress looks for are simply the <p>, <ul> and <ol> tags in the content if it is in auto-parsing mode. But as you’ve discovered, you can also use <!--commentblock--> quicktags to arbitrarily sub-divide content. Either way, the content is parsed by CommentPress after WordPress has filtered it. A bit of trial-and-error should get you closer to what you’re after.

Cheers,

Christian