Last week I heard about the difficulties that themers face in trying to effectively style the new threaded comments. There are a lot of nested lists and div tags, the hcard microformat for the commenter’s details and variable classes to give you a lot of styling options. On the surface they can seem pretty confusing but when you lay them out it is actually quite straightforward. The image below contains a breakdown of the html elements, the IDs and the classes that are applied to the various parts of the default 2.7 comment output.

Where a number is inserted I have used n. For example, comment-n, or depth-n. It is also worth noting that many of classes are variable, that is, even/odd, byuser, bypostauthor, and so on will only be the case if the comment is numbered odd or even, if a user has commented, if the post author has commented. There are a number of other classes like this. It should be clear which ones are which.

In the main image about I haven’t included all the detail of the comment form itself. I have included that in here:

If you have any questions or comments on this on this please let me know.

So, in yesterday’s poll I asked you what action you intended to take with regard to changing your theme for threaded comments in 2.7. The result has actually quite surprised me so I will jump right to it.

The largest section by far is from people that don’t actually like threaded comments. Of course there could be any number of reasons for this and I will certainly agree with some, but I wonder how this represents WordPress users as a whole. It is one of the drawbacks of listening to the community when you make updates that the most vocal people get results and that isn’t necessarily the majority.

I also assumed the IntenseDebate option would score higher; although, that may well be because readers of this blog tend to be more technically aware than the majority. It is a fairly technical blog after all.

As always thank you to everyone who took part in the poll. It helps me write better content and hopefully also helps to pull together opinions other than mine here. As my first two Monday polls have been a success, I plan on running one every Monday. If you have any ideas or even just questions you would like to ask other readers then feel free to put forward a suggestion.

With 2.7 possibly only a few days away I wanted to get a mood on what you intend to do once it is out, and once you have upgraded. I know some of you will upgrade immediately, some like me will have been running 2.7 since beta 3, and others will wait for evidence that there isn’t anything major in there that will break everything. This isn’t what interests me today. What interests me is your plans for comments.

Everyone was talking up threaded comments when their inclusion into the core was first announced, but since then the realities have started to dawn. Some of you have told me you don’t like threaded comments, some have tried them out and found them to be really difficult to get working how you want. This is especially true if you don’t like the default HTML that it spits out. Some, like me, think that IntenseDebate is too big an offer and that it will far easier to use that instead than worry about themes and things.

So the Monday poll for this week is: What are you planning to do about threaded comments when you upgrade to 2.7?

It looks like IntenseDebate is open for business again. They went back into private beta after being acquired by Automattic, no doubt to prepare properly for the flood of WordPress users, but now they are back and you can create an account now.

IntenseDebate is a plugin replacement for a blog’s commenting system. It handles the comments, threading, reputation points of commenters and a lot more. It also now has much better WordPress integration (similar to Disqus) so your comments will stay your own.

I think the timing of this is really interesting because IntenseDebate offers a really quite and simple way out for people upgrading to WordPress 2.7 and finding that their theme doesn’t support the new comment features, or that they are having difficulty converting to them.

I wrote a post a few weeks back: Why you should try Disqus before 2.7, and I think the same applies to IntenseDebate. It may well be the best way to upgrade the comments functions even though 2.7 has the natively.

Update: I have been told on twitter that there is a problem with the importer only importing one comment per post, per commenter. Whether that is setup specific or not I can’t say. The lesson here is to make sure you back up to make sure you can undo anything later.