No Runny Eggs

That’s right. After almost a month of delay, WordPress 2.7 is out. There are some nice improvements, both on the back end and the front end.

The biggest item on the front-end is threaded comments. To reply to a specific comment, just hit “Reply” just below the comment. I’ve enabled it all the way out to the maximum 10 levels of commenting.

One of the big things with WP 2.7 is paginated and threaded comments. That is great; however, there is one problem. The code masters had to create a new method of calling comments to get that, and as a result, I had been less-than-impressed with how WP 2.7 had been handling comment meta data (the “who” and “when”), and hacking the core was less-than-satisfactory. Instead of displaying my custom “…said on…/…pinged back on…with/…tracked back on…with”, it had a very ugly “…says:” with the when on a separate line.

Fortunately, Jeremy Clark found a way to allow customized comment meta data. The very-short version:

– Create a function in the theme’s functions.php that recreates, using the pre-WP 2.7 method, the customized styling. Don’t forget to add the new “reply” code, and don’t forget to save.
– Edit the “wp_list_comments” in the comments.php file to create a callback to that new function.

Thanks Jeremy. My one big complaint with WP 2.7 has been worked around. I can’t wait for it to hit public consumption.

As a side note; I’ve also done some further hacking of the Journalized 2.7.1 theme to get the threaded comments display the way I like it.

I decided to try the release candidate of WordPress 2.7 on a test blog.

The good:

– I like the new back-end.
– Pagination and threading is cool.
– The media uploader is (mostly-)working again after Adobe broke the Flash version. Specifically, the “no link” is respected, and it is possible to insert “original size” pics.

The bad:

– Had to do some modifying of the template to get it working right.
– I can’t figure out how to modify the intro to the comments.
– Filosofo Comments Preview doesn’t work with threaded comments (AJAX Comment Preview does, though I don’t want to go with that).

Revisions/extensions (11:56 am 12/5/2008) – I hadn’t reported on the compatibility of Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam with 2.7. While 3.1.1 is not entirely compatible (with “force registered users to enter the word” enabled, an admin can’t reply from the back end), the fresh 3.1.2 is.