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Comments on the Pages

  • Welcome to CommentPress (91 comments)

  • About CommentPress (87 comments)

    • Comment by hapa on August 7, 2007

      there’s a blur here. the standard blog comment is a note to the author or the reading group. the standard book note is a pointer for later reference by that one reader. collaborative texts are interesting to me, but i can’t use this to annotate your blog, because i can’t find it again easily.

      1) can’t track comments i left here, a year from now, from another location
      2) wouldn’t necessarily be able to find a comment i left here again even if i remembered what i’d said.

      this is probably a system service i’m talking about, integrated with any and all web browsers. it would appear on the page itself as a note i made and it would be in a searchable list of notes made in a dedicated — dunno, maybe “travel diary” interface.

      anyway my ideal would be to have clicked that talk bubble over there and have that make this note (with a public/private checkbox?) which then automatically registered — no — i’m talking about two different systems. comments for discussion, and a maybe a pencil icon for personal note. well anyhow the note would be logged in some portable database.

      Comment by jdwilbur on August 7, 2007

      Interesting point. Public and private comments is something we’ve definitely had on the radar before, and may put into Commentpress eventually. But the idea of publishing out your comments to a private, portable space—it’s a lot like a feature of most feed-readers. You can choose which links from your feed appear on a public blog, which is independent of the feed, and basically acts as a tracking device for all your readings.

      This, of course, requires a centralized service on which to store the feed records, so the model is different than Commentpress. But maybe there’s something we can think about here using OpenID and pingbacks or trackbacks. In any case, a difficult problem in our current model of distributed installs, but an interesting thought. Thanks!

      Comment by Alexandre Rafalovitch on August 7, 2007

      I use coComment’s services to track my public comments and conversations I participated in.

      It might be useful to have private meta-comment facility. I think I have heard of some tools like that (clipping services?), but I am not using any at the moment.

      Comment by hapa on August 7, 2007

      having this interface in font of me, with the floating composition space, it’s fantastic. a real mental freshener. it occurs to me that if the meta-comment gizmo were to exist it would have to be paired with a web snapshot facility to retain context. i don’t know how i would handle that, but it’s a problem with web research in general. when you start going element-by-element on a page you get that exponential thing — nifty though to be able to see your friends’ del.icio.us markings, graf by graf, as you browse. version control nightmare!

      Comment by Ross Smith on August 31, 2007

      Your development has already been eclipsed.

      Reframeit.com has a tool that anone can use to comment on any portion (a word, phrase, sentence, paragraph — anything they highlight with the cursor) of any web page on the internets!

      Comment by philippe boisnard on September 3, 2007

      Yes, I recognize the work of McKenzie. I’ve seen a demonstration during a festival at Paris.

      Comment by Shai Gluskin on September 28, 2007

      Ultimately, I’m not sure WordPress is the best platform for this idea. Maybe MediaWiki would be a better platform to start with. Or possibly Drupal.

      This implementation is limited by a lot of things, including the fact that the paragraph and the page are the only units of text that can be commented on.

      But it’s a great way to get a lot of people experimenting with relatively low technical threshold to cross.

      Comment by E.D. Kain on March 13, 2008

      Interesting concept.

      Comment by Lunchtime Links « Publicious on February 18, 2009

      […] Commentpress is one of the tools created by the Institute for the Future of the Book. It is a WordPress theme that re-orients the comments on the page to enable social interaction around long-form texts. […]

      Comment by Paul on March 14, 2009

      I’m a little at a loss for how ‘marginalia’ is lost. the ebook is always availalbe on the web’s ‘shelf’ just like any old book hidden on your book shelf. the same way you go back to find your book notes, you can find your web notes along with those of others which should provide a more edifying experience overall.

      i’m sure at some point the text and comments of important texts will be provided in a print version – there will always be a need for canonization by materialization. At that point, the text and annotations will be easily pulled and distributed to all. The social evolution of the book can be made palpable.

      This experiment excites me a great deal.

      […] here’s Commentpress in action. To me, this is simply an instance of how philosophy has its place in wrestling meaning from […]

      Comment by alan on March 30, 2009

      this is really interesting!

      […] which allows for no dialogue on their site with others. How about sticking those statements into a Commentpress site and starting an actual […]

      […] I would expect that beyond a classroom setting, Commentpress, as has already been suggested by Ben Vershbow, can be used in “scholarly contexts: working papers, conferences, annotation projects, journals, […]

      […] University Press published it as a conventional hardcover. But Wark also put it online using Commentpress. The free blog theme blew the book open into a series of conversations; every paragraph could spawn […]

      Comment by mace on June 1, 2009

      For private notes i use Zotero, which is basically a citation tool with some annotation functions. It’s implemented as a Firefox extension. I would prefer to by default share my notes and it AFAIK sharing of links and notes is in the works. Zotero takes snapshots of pages and retains a link to the original. I wish it had a function to compare the saved and the current versions of the original web page.

      Comment by mace on June 1, 2009

      I wonder if you’re aware of the term guthenbergs parenthesis, it’s fascinating. The point is, that the printing press brought forth an era between the manuscript era and digital era during which texts were neither annotated nor shared by readers. With manuscripts the copies of texts were so few that scholars and other people studying shared them and thus their annotations too.

      With the printing press, everybody could get their own private copy, thus no sharing was taking place. Also reading became a solitary, silent endeavour, unlike before. And now in the age of digital distribution, well… we spend all days discussing texts 🙂 Gutenberg parenthesis presents a period of silence in annotation and sharing the annotation.

      Comment by mace on June 1, 2009

      Personally i think a WP plugin is not a perfect solution, since it’s not generalist. I would find a 3rd party service for centralized comments and a method for client (browser) to fetch and display them. Such a system perhaps already exists, but i’ve just failed to utilize it. Anyhow the idea and implementation of this commenting system is fantastic in a limited context. You’ve done an excellent job at questioning the standard style of blog comments (i cannot believe that hasn’t evolved after blogs were invented) and presenting a functional examples of an alternative.

      Comment by mace on June 1, 2009

      I guess it is an inherent feature of commenting on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, that i already wrote about the issues rised here in an earlier comment above. Perhaps it would still be a good idea to first read through the whole text at one uninterrupted go before commenting. Instead of hopping from reading-mode to commenting-mode after each paragraph 😉

      Comment by mace on June 1, 2009

      There’s an simple article about web annotation on Wikipedia, with a list of implementations: I should go and try some.

      […] University Press published it as a conventional hardcover. But Wark also put it online using Commentpress. The free blog theme blew the book open into a series of conversations; every paragraph could spawn […]

      […] University Press published it as a conventional hardcover. But Wark also put it online using Commentpress. The free blog theme blew the book open into a series of conversations; every paragraph could spawn […]

      […] University Press published it as a conventional hardcover. But Wark also put it online using Commentpress. The free blog theme blew the book open into a series of conversations; every paragraph could spawn […]

      […] University Press published it as a conventional hardcover. But Wark also put it online using Commentpress. The free blog theme blew the book open into a series of conversations; every paragraph could spawn […]

      […] University Press published it as a conventional hardcover. But Wark also put it online using Commentpress. The free blog theme blew the book open into a series of conversations; every paragraph could spawn […]

      […] geeft het voorbeeld van McKenzie Wark die voor zijn boek Gamer Theory Commentpress gebruikte (een tool waar ik over schreef in 2007 en die sindsdien erg verbeterd […]

      […] In: WordPress plugins 16 Jun 2009 Looks interesting – useful for student feedback or peer review? Go to Source […]

      […] University Press published it as a conventional hardcover. But Wark also put it online using Commentpress. The free blog theme blew the book open into a series of conversations; every paragraph could spawn […]

      […] McKenzie Wark’s book, Gamer Theory which he released in it’s entirety online using Commentpress. Commentpress is an open source theme for WordPress that allows readers to comment paragraph by […]

      […] which allows for no dialogue on their site with others. How about sticking those statements into a Commentpress site and starting an actual […]

      […] It should be pointed out that while the JISCPress project is brand spanking new, the Commentpress/Marginalia project is officially two years old this month and the product of much research, development and testing of document publishing and annotation in a networked environment. I have blogged/raved about Commentpress before, and I encourage urge you to read about the background of Commentpress/Marginalia over on the Institute for the Future of the Book’s original Commentpress site. […]

      […] Thompson on the Future of Reading in a Digital World. New ways of Book Publishing: Commentpress: A WordPress theme for social texts. Bookglutton (”a site that launched last year, has put 1,660 books online and created tools […]

      […] combat de l’écran contre le papier, certaines réflexions qui ont aboutit a des outils comme Commentpress, réalisé en juillet 2007 par le Institute of the future of the book, ouvre une nouvelle voie à […]

      […] See it in action & read about its development at http://futureofthebook.org/commentpress/about/ […]

      […] very intrigued by some of the collaborative options that are becoming available for online books (Commentpress, BookGlutton) and by new publishing models (Free). The long-term implications for libraries are […]

      […] section rather than at the section as a whole.  The Institute for the Future of the Book have done research into online engagement with texts. It’s worth building on as Steph Gray did by including the […]

      […] of hours looking at Commentpress as a format for my WordPress blog. (But I missed reading the About […]

      […] Commentpress v1.x, form and function came as a single package. It’s worth reading about the background to Commentpress. You’ll see that it’s part of a larger course of research by the […]

      Comment by Crowd-Sourcing « Son Of Man on September 1, 2009

      […] the world of book publishing, collaborative reading (using a wordpress theme) is already in practice where readers can add their comment on for each page/paragraph/sentence or […]

      […] Future of Reading in a Digital World, he shares an example of how publishing a book online using Commentpress, …blew the book open into a series of conversations; every paragraph could spawn its own […]

      […] there are plugins to enable that. There is an old system called comment press that makes an interesting case about why you might want to do that. Don’t install that, though, install the new version called […]

      Comment by Stuart on October 24, 2009

      Any updates for commentpress latest development?

      […] technology gives a possibility to implement Talmudic traditional page layout in web applications. Commentpress declares that idea was taken from Talmud page layout. Russian car magazine utilizes idea of side […]

      Comment by Robert on December 3, 2009

      Nice para

      Comment by demetri on December 18, 2009

      i like the image of the book!

      Comment by demetri on December 18, 2009

      nice picture

      Comment by Rachael on January 7, 2010

      need to edit: “it can constantly being revised.”

      Comment by Christian Wach on January 22, 2010

      Thanks for the heads up Rachael – now fixed

      […] Commentpress » About Commentpress In the course of our tinkering, we achieved one small but important innovation. Placing the comments next to rather than below the text turned out to be a powerful subversion of the discussion hierarchy of blogs, transforming the page into a visual representation of dialog, and re-imagining the book itself as a conversation. […]

      […] 전체나, 각 쪽, 혹은 각 문단에 댓글을 달 수 있다: 사이트에 있는 예시 혹은 [해커 선언]을 쓴 맥킨지 왁(McKenzie Wark)의 [게이머 이론] 책의 […]

      Comment by Luc Legay on June 21, 2010

      A nice comment

      Comment by Yida Wang on July 15, 2010

      Interesting pic!

      Comment by Magnus on February 20, 2011

      This is a test comment. Hello, humans. Testing my typing skills. Bye, humans.

      […] Commentpress » About Commentpress In the course of our tinkering, we achieved one small but important innovation. Placing the comments next to rather than below the text turned out to be a powerful subversion of the discussion hierarchy of blogs, transforming the page into a visual representation of dialog, and re-imagining the book itself as a conversation. This entry was posted in Design and tagged blog, innovation. Bookmark the permalink. ← Drupal vs. WordPress thoughts from Bates Screencasts with Screenr → […]

      […] de la escolástica medieval. Algo que sí recupera y potencia, sin embargo, la plantilla creada para WordPress por futureofthebook.org. Por ello creo que, si de algo debe servir esta […]

      Comment by qualir on May 30, 2011

      As you said ! the future is good!

      Comment by thai on October 25, 2011

      I like the margin comments. Is it possible to place comments directly below the paragraph in a hide/show format? I’ve been searching for this kind of solution for some time now. Mostly trying to string multiple WordPress plug-ins together…which gets tricky in a hurry. I haven’t dl Commentpress yet but I hope its not to difficult to skin and rearrange some of the page elements. Also, how would you suggest having multiple books on one comment press?

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 16, 2011

      No, at present it’s not possible to change where the comments appear, but you could create a child theme to do this. Bear in mind that it would involve some pretty major revision, however.

      Multiple books can easily be done by installing CommentPress in a multisite environment.

      Comment by marygabq on January 24, 2012

      One advantage of comments in a separate pane is that a longer comment doesn’t interrupt the flow of the content but can be displayed in full in the separate space.

      […] de la escolástica medieval. Algo que sí recupera y potencia, sin embargo, la plantilla creada para WordPress por futureofthebook.org. Por ello creo que, si de algo debe servir esta […]

      Comment by 4. App concepts | Blog time! on February 25, 2013

      […] Where Are the Educational Apps for Adults? Incredible Popup Books For Grown ups (for my popup book) Future of the Book (example of interesting marginalia) This entry was posted in Social and Mobile Apps. Bookmark […]

      […] out that a number of WordPress plugins exist that support paragraph-by-paragraph comments, like Commentpress and Digressit. I hadn’t heard of these projects, and they don’t seem to have much of an […]

      […] technologies have changed how we write.  Technologies such as Commentpress (a WordPress plugin) make it possible to write collaboratively and make peer-review an open, transparent process.  […]

      Comment by steve on October 21, 2013

      This site – http://mcpress.media-commons.org/ShakespeareQuarterly_NewMedia/ – has a significantly different look than the out-of-the-box commentpress site.  I like the top menu bar (or whatever it’s called) that provides a home button, blog pin, etc.  and the colors are nice too.

      Just to be sure i understand…   In order to get a similar look, or at least move that way, I would need to create a child theme of CommentPress, and then modify (somehow) the css and php files?    Right?

      Just want to make sure I’m going in the right direction.

      Comment by Christian Wach on October 22, 2013

      You can switch to the older supplied theme – look for CommentPress Default in Appearance -> Themes. There will be a number of customization options that you can employ, spread between the WordPress Customizer and the CommentPress options page. To do more than that will require the use of a child theme such as Kathleen has used on the site you mention.

      […] I love WordPress, it seems to me that solutions such as commentpress have hit their ceiling.  Guys, it’s time to stop building your own solutions and look at […]

      Comment by Stuart Patterson on November 27, 2015

      I am trying to figure out the very basics of setting up a Comment Press document for my website:

      http://whyandwhat.net

      I am finding it impossible to get started with this plugin.

      1. To begin with: I cannot figure out how to rearrange my site menu so that when CommentPress is activated it lists the pages according to my menu arrangement in the Dashboard.

      2. Why are comments turned off on my page “Phaedrus”? How do I change this?

      3. Is it possible to create a single page on the larger site on which I can use CommentPress? Do I need to make every page open to comments? My aim is to publish a version of a text that students in a class can come to the site to comment on. So, the idea of a CommentPress “Document” is very attractive. (My initial inspiration is Social Book – a functionality and format that I would like to be able to approximate for specific pages on my blog.)

      But as much as I search this site, I cannot figure out answers to any of these questions. Any places with further information about how to make headway would be much appreciated.

      Comment by Stuart Patterson on November 27, 2015

      Ok – figured out how to reorder my TOC, still can’t figure out how to get the “Special Pages” to either move or disappear from the main menu. Also still wondering if I can somehow isolate a document with CommentPress enabled within my larger WordPress site.

      Thanks for any help!

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 30, 2015

      Hi Stuart, the way you can “isolate a document with CommentPress enabled within my larger WordPress site” is to use WordPress Multisite. There are detailed instructions on the CommentPress installation page on the WordPress plugin directory.

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 30, 2015

      Hi Stuart, I’ll try and address all your questions in one go…

      “I cannot figure out how to rearrange my site menu”

      Glad you figured out how to reorder your menu.

      “Why are comments turned off on my page “Phaedrus”? How do I change this?”

      WordPress turns comments on pages off by default since version 4.3. You may have to explicitly allow commenting on a page now. You can do so by clicking “Edit Page” and ticking the checkbox there. If it’s not visible, check your “Screen Options”.

      “My aim is to publish a version of a text that students in a class can come to the site to comment on.”

      I would highly recommend the WordPress Multisite route I described earlier. This will allow you to add BuddyPress (and some other plugins) to create “classes” which can read and comment on the CommentPress site/document.

      You can see this in action at Digital Thoreau, for example, which uses Commons in a Box plus a plugin called BP Group Sites to link the BuddyPress classes to the CommentPress texts.

      Comment by Stuart Patterson on November 30, 2015

      Christian,

      Ok – got the multi site up and running. So the address in this comment is to the new subdomain. I still can’t get pages to allow comments, however, except the title page. When I go to edit the settings on pages, it looks like the title page has different settings to choose from. I am posting two screen grabs here to show you what I am looking at on the page settings on the admin side of the site – the first is the title page, the second a page I created to start building the text I want students to comment on:

      I have tried about every permutation on the site wide plugin settings, including setting and unsetting the Default. Any help?

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 30, 2015

      Did you adjust your Screen Options? Tick “Discussion” and you should see a box beneath the content where you can allow comments on your page.

      Comment by Stuart Patterson on December 24, 2015

      Christian,

      If you mean the Discussion settings in WP, no, I don’t see anything regarding “screen options” there. I already allow comments on this page, so I am not sure what you mean by this.

      Also, a new question: how can I edit my text to choose what becomes a paragraph of text? I am trying to format a dialogue (as in dramatic dialogue) but I don’t want every line by a new actor as a paragraph.

      Thanks

      Comment by Stuart Patterson on December 24, 2015

      Christian,

      My apologies – just realized where you were pointing me in re Screen Options.

      Also, I wonder if this is the place where I should be asking these types of questions. Is there a more appropriate forum for support?

      Thanks.

      Comment by Christian Wach on January 4, 2016
      Comment by Christian Wach on January 4, 2016

      Also, a new question: how can I edit my text to choose what becomes a paragraph of text? I am trying to format a dialogue (as in dramatic dialogue) but I don’t want every line by a new actor as a paragraph.

      New questions are usually better in new threads, though this gives me the chance to use the comment-quoting functionality, I guess!

      Have a look at the comment-block quicktag for separating the text in arbitrary ways.

      Comment by Stuart Patterson on February 13, 2016

      Christian,

      Greetings again from Stuart. I’ve gotten my “Readers’ Phaedrus” up now, but am experiencing a difficulty now with commenting from outside users. Specifically, all my students have reported, and I have experienced myself, an inability to get a comment posted due to a spinning status bar. Everyone who’s tried to comment on my site has experienced this, and only I an one other person have resolved it by shutting our browsers and logging back in sometime later to try again.

      I tried to address the issue by inviting all my students to the site as Contributors, but this seems not to have helped in anyone’s case. Any insights? And thanks for taking my questions here – I am not conversant in code to the level I’d need to be to use GitHub.

      Comment by Christian Wach on February 15, 2016

      I tried to comment on your site and got the response: “http://phaedrus.whyandwhat.net/wp-comments-post.php Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 403 (Forbidden)”.

      This suggests a misconfiguration issue with WordPress on your server. I would contact the server host and ask for a sysadmin to take a look.

      Cheers, Christian

      Great overview and discussion of a tool I look forward to implementing in my English courses. Keep up the great project overviews. The detail and concise information is invaluable!

      Comment by Stacy on January 16, 2017

      I’m interested in using this, but I don’t understand how the text is used.

      For example, if I wanted to use an article from the web, I couldn’t just post it for my students. I’d have to get written permission to copy it so I could have it on my blog.

      How does this work? I really like the idea, but I don’t know how to put it to use without violating copyright laws.

      Comment by Christian Wach on January 17, 2017

      Hi Stacy, I’m not qualified to advise on legal matters, but perhaps one solution might be to make your website private so that only your students can view content when logged in? There are plugins such as Restricted Site Access that can make this happen.

      Comment by Uranium Club on April 11, 2017

      I’m wondering if it’s possible to to edit comments in place?

      Comment by Christian Wach on April 11, 2017

      If you’re logged in, then the “edit” link should be visible on all comments that you have the capability to edit. It does take you to the WordPress back end, however.

      […] CommentPress: a theme for WordPress that the MLA Commons uses for the Bauer/Zirker piece and that has been used by high profile DHers like Wardrip-Fruin and Fitzpatrick to circulate prepublication drafts of texts for public comment. […]

      Comment by ggharbi on February 15, 2023

      ghjgj

  • Bug reports (86 comments)

    • Comment by AnnaBella on July 30, 2007

      I tried this theme on my test site. It seems to work fine in Firefox but I get a javascript void error in IE.

      Comment by Eddie A. Tejeda on July 31, 2007

      This should be resolved in version 1.1

      Comment by Dustin on October 1, 2007

      I’ve run into this same issue. It would appear to be something that shows up in Commentpress when you have WP2.3 installed. I was able to successfully use CP with both WP versions 2.1 and 2.2.3.

      A look at my htttpd error log seems to indicate that CP causes some sort of unrecoverable error. Example:
      [Thu Sep 27 10:56:34 2007] [notice] child pid 1596 exit signal Illegal instruction (4)

      I’ve received the same issue on both Mac OSX and Solaris. I’ve tried it both with Apache 1.33 and Apache2, and PHP4 and 5.

      This really does seem to be some incompatibility between WP2.3 and CP1.4.

      Thanks!

      Comment by Leslie Johnston on October 9, 2007

      Is something like captcha or recaptcha in the development plan, or has added this themselves? Our sys admin wonders if there is a way to integrate challenge-response into Commentpress to avoid automated spamming.

      Comment by Jon Potts on October 23, 2007

      I’m new to Commentpress and just a week old on the edublogs site.

      I’d love to use Commentpress for my English class homepage/blog, but…
      The “read/write comments” bubbles do not seem to function on my site. I click and nothing happens–my fault?

      Comment by Godffrey on September 3, 2008

      We look forward to seeing developments in the future.

      Comment by Bruce D'Arcus on February 4, 2009

      On the floating overview list, the “Paragraph X” list seems both repetitive, and rather thin on information. Am wondering if it might be more helpful to instead have a heading “Paragraphs” followed by a numbered list that includes the first line of each paragraph?

      Comment by MJ Ray on February 5, 2009

      eddie@futureofthebook.org is a bouncing address.

      Anyway: when will Commentpress be accessible without JavaScript? It’s not possible to use this without failing accessibility guidelines at present, which is a shame for a good tool. If it’s not planned yet, can you outline what changes you think would be needed?

      Comment by Jon on September 16, 2009

      Hi there

      Is Commentpress dead? Any news of updates to theme welcome!

      Best wishes

      Jon

      Comment by Jon on September 16, 2009

      I should add if anyone can drop the code or where to find it to make compatible with 2.8.4 pls do.

      Comment by Ruby on October 6, 2010

      Hi, I’m using Commentpress 3.1 on my multisite WordPress site v 3.0.1. We’re having a problem with Safari users who are logged in. When they click to “comment on this page” (or paragraph), it just reloads the page but the comment form does not appear.  It works fine in Safari for registered users, but we need for everyone to be able to comment on the site.  Is there anything I can do to fix this?

      The site is at https://blogs.hastac.org/duke/makn

      Comment by Ruby on October 6, 2010

      A little more info: we SOMETIMES have the above issue with Firefox and IE as well.

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 17, 2010

      @MJ: It has been ever since version 3.1. The latest version (3.2) adds full compatibility with the WCAG 2.0 guidelines. Caveat: that’s as far as we call tell without a professional audit.

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 17, 2010

      Er, no. Please check back for version 3.2 – out today.

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 17, 2010

      Commentpress 3.2 now requires WordPress 3.0.1.

      Comment by Rob Mc on December 30, 2010

      There is a problem adding comments.  I’m using WordPress 3.04.  I enter the first comment, say on paragraph 3, and all is well.  Then, when I go to enter a second comment, be it on paragraph 3 or any other, it won’t do it in the sidebar — the mouse never changes to allow text entry.  However, if I toggle to full page, it will allow typing.  Weird, I know, but there you go.  I’m running Chrome, if that helps.

      Comment by Christian Wach on December 31, 2010

      Thanks for the report Rob, will investigate

      Comment by Martin Burr on January 23, 2011

      Automatic installation only installs ‘readme.txt’, error in header is the error message.

      Comment by Christian Wach on January 23, 2011

      Hi Martin – Are you trying to install Commentpress from the WordPress plugins repository? That won’t work. Please download the plugin and theme from this site instead.

      Comment by andy on April 20, 2011

      Hi guys,
      loving commentpress – thanks for all the hard work!
      is there any way to use a child theme of CP and still get the commentpress options? i can understand that its not possible to support other themes, but it seems counter-intuative not to support child themes, as it means i have to hack the commentpress theme itself to make any changes.
      any suggestions on how i can get round this?
      thanks 🙂

      Comment by Eric Bakovic on July 2, 2012

      I also have a problem adding comments, though it’s somewhat different — I just can’t. I’m using WP mu 3.4, and when I try to add a comment, the “adding a comment” animated bar just keeps going and nothing gets added. (I’m having the same problem with digress.it, FWIW.)

      Comment by Eric Bakovic on July 2, 2012

      Meant to add: I’m experiencing the same problems in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on a Mac. And the problem is only with my own installation (https://quote.ucsd.edu/bakovic/), not with others (such as this one, obviously, since I can leave comments).

      Comment by Christian Wach on July 3, 2012

      Thank you for discovering a bug in Commentpress – it’s never been tested in https environments before and you revealed a weakness in how the AJAX commenting plugin was loading scripts. I’ve updated the plugin on GitHub.

      Comment by Peter on July 6, 2012

      WP 3.4.1. Multisite ->sub-blog1) When I try to reactivate ‘Display Header Text’ under Theme->customize->’Site Title and Tagline’ the title and tagline don’t reappear.2)Additionally: Regardless of what I check/uncheck/choose for options. The table of Contents page only displays TOC and nothing else.This is a fresh install.Any suggestions welcome.

      Comment by Christian Wach on July 6, 2012

      I’ve posted an update to the theme on GitHub which solves this for me. Thanks for alerting me to the issue.

      Comment by Peter on July 7, 2012

      Hi Christian, The fix works a treat for the title/tagline. they are visible again.You can see the Table of Contents issue @ http://journey.faithworks.eu/table-of-contents/One other issue now,I hide page title.I have added centered h1 tags+text instead for headings.They have all aligned left since the update.I tried deleting and recreating but they insist on going left.The HTML seems ok to me and in edit mode they are centered. Thanks for an awesome theme : )

      Comment by Peter on July 8, 2012

      Hi Christian, I don’t know if this is a bug or a user error. But when I try to activate Commentpress for BuddyPress I get “fatal error BP Groupblog must installed”, although it is installed. I have tried Network activation/local activation etc. WP 3.4.1/ BP 1.5.6/ BP for CP 1.0/BP Groupblog 1.7.1

      Comment by Peter on July 21, 2012

      Hi Christian, I noticed that the commentpress plugin fails (on the user end) with a fatal error when you use Rich text editing in conjunction with German as the default site language. 

      Comment by Christian Wach on July 23, 2012

      Thanks for the report, Peter – I’ll look into it.

      Comment by Christian Wach on July 23, 2012

      Commentpress for BuddyPress is deprecated now. Please use Commentpress for Multisite instead.

      Comment by Christian Wach on July 23, 2012

      This seems to be a bug in WordPress core. If you add the following line just before line 548 of ‘wp-includes/js/tinymce/langs/wp-langs.php’, everything works as expected:

      if ( ! class_exists( '_WP_Editors' ) ) { require( ABSPATH . WPINC . '/class-wp-editor.php' ); }

      I’ll file a bug report on WordPress Trac. Thanks!

      Comment by Christian Wach on July 23, 2012

      Bug report filed here. Patch attached, which fixes the problem.

      Comment by Jonathan Dueck on August 31, 2012

      Hi, I’m trying to use CommentPress in several classes I’m teaching at Duke University. This past year I used it and it was a marvelous tool for writing-intensive work. But the University has just updated to WordPress 3.3.2 and CommentPress no longer works–paragraphs no longer have a “comment” icon to their left. This is true using the previous and current versions of CommentPress (as of 8/31/2012). I realize this might well be a result of the integration of WordPress at Duke with our NetID (Shibboleth) authentication system. But I thought I’d ask if you know of version incompatibilities between the current version of CommentPress and WordPress 3.3.2?

      Comment by Christian Wach on September 3, 2012

      Replied offlist

      Comment by Gord Wilson on January 12, 2013

      HiThis is exactly what our writing group is needing.I have it on the test site and for the most part it is working ok.It is a multisite and is running WP 3.5.I think I first activated it as a network but then changed it to a site activation.It is using the built in menu and dosen’t seem to use the built in WP menus.  This is ok I guess but not ideal.The problem is on the built in menu the home page button takes you back to the root web-sitei instead of the sub website. Of course I don’t have CP installed on the root website so it just goes to a blank screen..Can I edit a php file to fix this or can I get CP to use the WP menu system? Thanks

      Comment by Mike Kelly on May 9, 2013

      We’re trying to install CommentPress 3.4.8 on a WordPress 3.4.2 server (multisite-enabled) and have run into problems.

      When the plugin & theme are activated on a blog, the CommentPress UI shows up as expected. However, clicking on the add comment icon next to any post gives us a blank comment tab on the right, and the following javascript error:

      Uncaught TypeError: Cannot call method ‘split’ of undefined
      [snip code]

      Any/all help would be appreciated. Can’t give you the URL of the actual box as it’s an internal dev server.

      Comment by Christian Wach on May 10, 2013

      Replied to you by email, Mike.

      Comment by gabriell con(tech)text on July 27, 2013

      How does CommentPress deal with Revisions? I change lots and have a huge revision history. Are annotations stored/moved/lost/fully accounted for version-by-version/altogether somewhere or…. ? Otherwise, lovely tool.

      Comment by Christian Wach on July 29, 2013

      CommentPress ignores revisions, since it was primarily built as a tool for commenting on static texts, for example digital copies of already-published books.

      Revising the text too much will “orphan” the comments and make them appear under the page- or post-level comments section, though they can be reassigned to paragraphs by dragging their “Move” button to the appropriate paragraph.

      Applying comments to particular revisions would be possible, but I’ve not given it much thought so far since I imagine it to be a complex feature to implement.

      Comment by José D on August 21, 2013

      I installed the plugin but something is off. Could be the theme not loading completely, or a CSS issue. Digress.it ran ok, but I rather go with your project. Can you help?.

      Comment by José D on August 21, 2013

      Fixed it. Apparently theme was not copied to appropriate folder. I copied it manually. All OK now.

      Comment by Christian Wach on August 21, 2013

      Glad to hear it’s fixed, José, but odd that any themes needed copying anywhere, since CommentPress defines its own themes directory. What exactly did you need to do? Which version of WordPress are you using? Anything special about your setup?

      Comment by Shawn on September 9, 2013

      Hi!

      We’ve got commentpress 3.5 installed, but we’re getting a funny error with some of our users. Seems to happen if, while entering a comment, the paragraph in question gets scrolled out of frame -get an ajax error, ‘Cannot call method ‘toSTring’ of undefined

      but other times not. See

      https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BTun6S7CYAMc0bC.png

      Comment by Shawn on September 9, 2013

      also get error, ‘a is undefined’

      Comment by Mike Stumpf on September 22, 2013

      Hello,

      I am getting fatal PHP errors when I try to use the commentpress-core themes:

      PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function bp_get_blogs_root_slug() in …/wp-content/plugins/commentpress-core/themes/commentpress-modern/assets/templates/navigation.php on line 140

      &

      PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function bp_get_blogs_root_slug() in …/wp-content/plugins/commentpress-core/themes/commentpress-theme/assets/templates/user_links.php on line 65

      The plugins I am using are: CommentPress-core, Commons in a Box, All in One WP Security, Jetpack, and Akismet.  I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling CommentPress but with no luck.  I have not modified anything in the plugin files.

      Do you know why this might be happening?

      Thanks

      Comment by Christian Wach on September 23, 2013

      Hi Mike, sounds like something is amiss with your BuddyPress installation. Do you have blog signups enabled? Do you have any BuddyPress components disabled?

      Comment by Vincent on February 17, 2014

      Could you please integrate this plugin annotatorjs.org? It will enhance CommentPress with the wonderful function of commenting on selected words!

      Comment by Christian Wach on February 18, 2014

      Interesting, thanks for pointing me to it.

      Comment by Vincent on February 18, 2014

      And this plugin (under GPLv2) is also very powerful, it can track changes like Microsoft Word. But it is based on CKEditor, I’m not sure if it can be integrated with CommentPress.

      Comment by Christian Wach on February 19, 2014

      Thanks again – though I’m not clear how that would enhance CommentPress. What advantages do you see in it?

      Comment by Sarah on March 26, 2015

      Hi – have noticed that the sidebars do not scroll in Chrome for us, although they are working fine here. Fine for us in Firefox and IE.

      Comment by Christian Wach on March 27, 2015

      Thanks for the report. I’m following up on this via email.

      Comment by Dave on January 12, 2016

      Not a bug . . . more of a feature request . . . actually, more of a request that you develop something like a CommentPress option for a wiki that would provide a platform for collaborative develpment of point — counterpoint type articles.   The main article (left column) would contain the position, arguments, and evidence for Position  A.  The left side column would be for counterpoint arguments . . . mostly short responses with links to other articles that would more systematically present the opposing view.

      I was even thinking of raising money to hire a developer to create this plugin, as I have some great applications for it.  A more complete description of what I have in mind is at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T117368

      Besides the platform (a collaborative wiki rather than a blog), what makes my proposal distinctly different from is that rather than have a running list of comments from numerous contributors (as you currently have it, which is very cool), the wiki version would enable collaborating editors to edit and refine the counterpoint argument and modify the links to the more complete responses to each point.

      As I indicated, if this is within your coding skill set, I would even consider trying to raise money to fund development of plugin that could be used in a wiki environment.

      Comment by Christian Wach on January 29, 2016

      Hi Dave, sounds like a good idea. Good luck with the project!

      Comment by julien on March 8, 2016

      Hi,

      Thank you very much for this great plugin.

      I need to customize the comment form with several additionnal fields. I installed the “WP advanced comment” plugin for this. But it doesn’t work with Commentpress core.

      Do you know why and how I could customize the comment form (with new fields, flag option, likes, etc.)

      Thanks for your help !

      Comment by Christian Wach on March 9, 2016

      CommentPress predates the comment_form() function, which I suspect is what the plugin you want to use hooks into. Upgrading CommentPress to use comment_form() is not trivial, I’m afraid.

      What you could do, however, is create a child theme and override the CommentPress comment form template with your own version that is compatible with WP Advanced Comment.

      Alternatively, there are a number of hooks in the stock CommentPress comment form that you could use to inject extra fields. Have a look at the ‘comment_form.php’ template for details.

      Comment by Ralph Bloch on December 2, 2016

      I am trying to ‘publish’ an interactive book using CommentPress. Since I am learning while doing, chapter 8 is the one chapter formated properly. But I do not see consistent paragraph marks, nor does the number of paragraphs for comments seem to correspond to the actual number of paragraphs in the document. It could be that I am doind something wrong. If so, I haven’t figured out what it is.

      Comment by Ralph Bloch on December 4, 2016

      SOLVED!

      When I replace <p class=”Standard”> ….</p>

      with:

      <p><span class = “Standard”>….</span></p>

      it works. Odd, isn’t it?

      Comment by Christian Wach on December 5, 2016

      Thanks for reporting your workaround, Ralph. Adding custom classes to paragraphs or other top-level tags isn’t supported by CommentPress. Adding tags inside – as you have done – is fine.

      Comment by Ralph Bloch on December 12, 2016

      I am using a CommentPress child-theme/child-template. In the stylesheet I define a style .standard {…..; text-align:justify;…}

      It justifies when I use it as <p class=”standard”>, but then the commenting doesn’t work. For the commenting to work, I use <p><span class=”standard”>, but then it doesn’t justify. It would be really neat if I could both justify and comment on a paragraph.

      Comment by Christian Wach on December 13, 2016

      Hi Ralph – if you use the built-in “Justify” button in TinyMCE, then your text should be both justified and commentable. The underlying code is:

      <p style="text-align: justify;"></p>

      Cheers, Christian

      Comment by Christian Wach on December 13, 2016

      Hi Ralph – you can see the result applying the standard theme unit tests against CommentPress on this test site. The tests are those for theme authors to see all the built-in formatting possibilities and make sure the theme accommodates them. The paragraph justification page can be found by following this link.

      Comment by Ralph Bloch on December 13, 2016

      Thanks Christian, I got a bit confused by the format tags you can see, and those you can’t. I am used to handcrafting my style-sheets. My tinyMCE editor does not seem to have a ‘Justify’ button, but using the menu item chain Format>Formats>Align>Justify I could get the desired effect.

      The pages now look pretty much as I like them. I am just left with one beef: I don’t seem to be able to modify the vertical paragraph distance. <style> {…;padding-bottom: 0.3in;..} doesn’t seem to do the trick, even if I fortify it with !important. Do you have any helpful suggestions?

      Ralph

      Comment by Christian Wach on December 13, 2016

      Ah yes, TinyMCE was tweaked recently. You’ll now find the Justify button if you click the Toolbar Toggle button. It’s in the second row.

      I don’t seem to be able to modify the vertical paragraph distance

      Try setting the margin instead:

      p.textblock {margin-bottom: 1em;}

      The above CSS works for me.

      Comment by Ralph Bloch on January 3, 2017

      I have another little problem that I was unable to solve: The second of the three panel switches obscures the right side of the text body when scrolling. I found its “right:74px;”, but I don’t seem to be able to create a child template for screen.min.css.

      Is there something, I can do?

      Comment by Christian Wach on January 4, 2017

      Hi Ralph, you should be able to override anything in the default stylesheet by being more specific in targeting the element in your child theme’s stylesheet. A CSS tutorial will explain the mechanics of specificity to you – it’s a bit complex to explain in a comment reply.

      Out of interest, what is your issue with the button overlapping the text? There should be plenty of screen space where it doesn’t do so.

      Cheers, Christian

      Comment by Ralph Bloch on January 13, 2017

      Hi Christian,

      The comment button is floating, so when users scroll, it obstructs parts of the rightmost body text. I notice that the comment press website doesn’t display the comment button. How did you get rid of it? Also, where is the CSS tutorial, you are referring to?

      Thanks, Ralph

      Comment by Christian Wach on January 13, 2017

      This website currently uses the “Modern” theme supplied with the plugin. I’d still be interested to hear why you think the button in the “Flat” theme is problematic.

      I don’t know any particularly good ones, but I’m sure you can search for a relevant tutorial.

      Comment by Ralph Bloch on January 24, 2017

      Hi Christian,

      I solved the button problem in the Flat them by moving them to the right, so the comment button no longer obscures text.

      But now I have a real problem: Being obsessive compulsive I W3 validated the html on all 135 pages of my online eBook.After a few minor corrections, they all passed – except two! Both showed the error:

      Error: No p element in scope but a p end tag seen.

      Both occurred with the first of two captioned illustrations (the only two pages with two illustrations). The source code reads:

      <!– cp_caption_start –><span class=”captioned_image alignleft” style=”width: 400px”><span id=”attachment_2888″  class=”wp-caption”><img class=”size-full wp-image-2888″ src=”http://www.stuehlingen.online/Book/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/BusColAbs-e1485171019750.png” alt=”Business mix, absolute” width=”400″ height=”282″ /></span><small class=”wp-caption-text”>Figure 8. Absolute commercial pattern of 34 most active merchants.</small></span><!– cp_caption_end –></p>

      And it is the unpaired </p> at the end that triggers the error.

      In the page editor it looks thus:

      [caption id="attachment_2888" align="alignleft" width="400"]<img class=”size-full wp-image-2888″ src=”http://www.stuehlingen.online/Book/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/BusColAbs-e1485171019750.png” alt=”Business mix, absolute” width=”400″ height=”282″ /> Figure 8. Absolute commercial pattern of 34 most active merchants.[/caption]

      Without a trailing </p>.

      In the WP forum they are telling me that the problem must be due to the plugin.

      Comment by Christian Wach on January 24, 2017

      Hi Ralph, can you email me please? I have an idea why this might be happening, but I’d like to see what the editor really shows and how the caption is placed in the flow of the text. Comments are a bit of an unwieldy way to manage this!

      Cheers, Christian

      Comment by Ralph Bloch on January 24, 2017

      Hurray, I found a kludge! On both pages, the image was the first element. When I precede the image with “<p><span></span></p> the error disappears. The display does not change. If, however, I only insert <p></p> it doesn’t help.

      Comment by Christian Wach on January 24, 2017

      Thanks for the workaround and for finding the bug. I can confirm that a captioned image as the first item does indeed break the markup. It is actually a (presumably unintentional) quirk of the WordPress wp_autop() function that results in this error – so in a sense it’s not the “fault” of CommentPress, but it’s also not the “fault” of WordPress either! Quirks are unavoidable. I will post a fix for this in due course.

      Comment by Peter Hulse on August 31, 2017

      The scrollbar on the table of contents does not activate until the TOC is clicked. Until the bottom of the table is not visible to the user. Have I got too many items on it? I’ve tried adapting the CSS. No success. I hope you can help. Apart from this, I rate Commentpress very highly.

      Comment by Christian Wach on August 31, 2017

      Hi Peter, which browser are you using when you see this? Do you have a site where I can see the problem for myself? If not, steps to reproduce the problem would be most helpful.

      Cheers, Christian

      Comment by Peter Hulse on August 31, 2017

      http://www.argonautica4.co.uk is the website where I’m having the problem with the scroll bar on the table of contents. I use Safari but I’ve looked at it in IE and Chrome and it’s the same. Thanks for replying. Peter

      Comment by Christian Wach on September 5, 2017

      Hi Peter, it looks to me as though you have Javascript errors and CSS issues which need clearing up. Once you have done that, I suspect the left hand column will scroll as expected.

      Cheers, Christian

      Comment by William on April 20, 2018

      Hi, when exporting my commentpress site data to import into another site, it seems the database comment field ‘comment_signature’ is not included in the export. This means that on the new site the comments have lost their links to the correct paragraph. Are you able to fix this? Do you know of a work around? Thanks!

      Comment by Christian Wach on April 20, 2018

      Hi William – please read this support thread for the solution.

      Cheers, Christian

      Comment by Tara Carlisle on May 1, 2018

      Hi,

      The comment form only displays on the home page, not on the other pages. So when one clicks on the icon to add a comment on page 2 and after, the form does not open to allow someone to add a comment.

      We would like to use CommentPress to co-author a white paper for a grant we received.

      Tara Carlisle

       

      Comment by Christian Wach on May 1, 2018

      You will need to enable comments on the other pages. On the “Edit Page” screen, you may need to tick the “Discussion” box in the “Screen Options” slide-down panel at the top of the page. The box will allow you to enable comments.

      (For some time now, WordPress has disabled discussion on pages by default. IIRC it was because for the majority of sites, pages are static, merely informational things. Not so in CommentPress, of course.)

      Comment by Anon on April 11, 2019

      Hi,

      I am having difficulty with the right column on my website.

      For some reason, instead of having a scroll bar, all of the text is visible and eventually overflows beneath the main column.

      Also, the tab buttons in the right column seem like default buttons instead of the nice ones on this website.

      Do you have any suggestions for what might cause this or how to solve it?

      Cheers

      Comment by Christian Wach on April 23, 2019

      You appear to be using a plugin that is a clone of CommentPress. You should contact the developers directly:

      https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/commentarysandbox/

      Comment by Madeline on June 30, 2019

      Hi! I’m using the CommentPress Core theme and added a Forum/Discussion section as well to the WordPress site. Unfortunately, using the CommentPress Core theme, within the forums all of the comments are automatically transformed into ALL CAPS which is making them sound a little bit aggressive. Is there any way to fix this?

       

      Thanks,

      Madeline

      Comment by Christian Wach on July 2, 2019

      Hi Madeline, which plugin are you using to implement your forums?

      Comment by Leo on November 30, 2020

      Hello, is it normal that the archive of the categories of the blog are only one page (a ten items) ?

      Comment by Christian Wach on December 15, 2020

      Yes, that’s normal. If you have more than that, you’ll find arrows which allow you to navigate to further pages of ten items each.

  • Examples (60 comments)

    • Comment by KF on July 26, 2007

      My in-process article on Commentpress, in Commentpress: http://new.plannedobsolescence.net

      Comment by Dylan Knight Rogers on July 26, 2007

      The Untitled Document is using Commentpress:

      http://theuntitleddocument.org

      Comment by Jeppe K on July 30, 2007

      I created a website with the Constitution of Denmark for people to debate a much talked about future update of the law. It’s called Grundlovs Debat.

      It’s in Danish though, so non-Danish readers probably won’t get much out of it, but Commentpress is a very cool tool for discussing texts like that.

      Comment by mjd on August 3, 2007

      I am using the Theme to dust off and work on a decade old project: Nomads at the Gate (http://dubnick.com/nomads/). I am just getting use to WP, so this is going to be slow process of gearing up….

      Comment by kadewe on August 8, 2007

      Howdy Book Futurists,
      I am setting up a “Plog” at http://www.didactalab.de/plog – right now it is in German language, but here is a short synopsis of the Plog idea:
      A “Plog” is a Publication Blog, where the author(s) reflect their publications:

      Short synopsis of the most important points with some quotes
      reflection of thoughts
      background infos and material, insights from today (what was good, where did we go wrong etc.)
      rediscover ideas
      make texts accessible where no fulltext is in open access
      start discussion with readers
      collect ideas, questions, contra-positions etc. from the readers

      It’s a great tool – thanks for making it available!

      Comment by copystar on August 11, 2007

      Scholr 2.0 : a white paper by Scholars Portage
      (“getting research from one body to another”)

      Much thanks for Commentpress and all your work!

      Comment by Alan Levine on November 30, 2007

      I’ve been eager to try this since it came out. We just published a Commentpress version of a new NMC white paper “Social Networking, the “Third Place,” and the Evolution of Communication”
      http://web.nmc.org/communication/

      Comment by Bruce Deger on January 9, 2008

      I am a middle school teacher and my advisory/homeroom is using the blog to discuss a book we are reading. The students and I take turns reading the book. We record the readings in Audacity and upload the mp3s to the blog posts for students who are absent. Our discussions are pretty basic at this point, but I think the format has potential for giving students practice in reading, writing, speaking and listening.

      […] Examples […]

      Comment by PJ Brunet on January 22, 2008

      I had a similar idea about three years ago at the library, nice implementation!

      Comment by PJ Brunet on January 22, 2008

      You could also use this to collaboratively translate a text 😉

      Comment by Scienceguru on January 23, 2008

      I use Commentpress as the layout for my AP Biology class’ blog, where we discuss issues in science, technology and society: TheBiologySpace.BioBlog

      Comment by Jack Phelps on January 25, 2008

      Just another person testing out commentpress. neat idea; in our software we’ve got word-by-word commenting so teachers can click just about anywhere in a student’s work and write in comments, which has its advantages and disadvantages vs this.

      Comment by Stephen Francoeur on April 2, 2008

      CUNY just put a draft of its 2008-2012 Master Plan up using Commentpress.

      Comment by Michael Becker on April 13, 2008

      I used Commentpress to put my entire master’s thesis online for public scrutiny.

      Comment by Ben Oehler on May 30, 2008

      Correspondence training in theology and apologetics for students in Russia and the Ukraine.
      We just started. Give me a couple of months and I will be able to give you a kind of report…
      Prof Ben Oehler, HGE University,
      Odessa, Ukraine

      Comment by Joss Winn on February 4, 2009

      A site for commenting on public reports in considerable detail. Texts are broken down into their respective sections for easier consumption. Rather than comment on the text as a whole, you are encouraged to direct comments to specific paragraphs.

      Comment by Steve on June 18, 2009

      this is a great application. Looks like something that can really help collaboration.

      […] través de los comentarios que pueden leerse en los ejemplos que ofrecen los creadores, he llegado a la página de Jack Slocum -un lugar muy interesante para […]

      Comment by w on September 9, 2009

      This link appears to be broken. I’m so eager to see how you’re using this.

      Comment by KF on November 24, 2009

      Yeah, that’s a 2+ year old link, which is no longer working.  That article is now readable at http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/cpfinal and my book, also in CommentPress, is available at http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence.

      Comment by Mr Test Guy on December 1, 2009

      Just checking to see how this works…

      Comment by Chart on December 6, 2009

      ditto

      Comment by Y-Love on January 14, 2010

      Just testing this, and seeing how threaded the replies are.

      Comment by jean Lyon on February 12, 2010

      Hi
      I have just discovered Commentpress, thank you for making it available, great tool for some sort of collaborative work
      Please keep updating it
      Thank you from France

      Comment by Stuart on March 31, 2010

      How did you find it worked in reality?

      Comment by Elton on April 9, 2010

      Are there ANY working links and examples for this project? Thanks in advance.

      Comment by Christian Wach on April 9, 2010

      Yes, have a look at the two MediaCommons projects posted by KT above. Will try and post  asap.

      Comment by Mark on June 22, 2010

      Definitely thinking of using this. Does it take over the whole site though or just word docs?

      Comment by M on June 28, 2010

      Also testing the same thing

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 17, 2010

      We hope you’ll be pleased that version 3.2 is out today

      Comment by JJ Aucouturier on December 13, 2010

      The 3m10p project at Temple University used CommentPress to allow students to collaborate on research article drafts. Students in Temple’s Tokyo campus design psychology experiments and write the drafts, and psychology majors from Temple main campus in Philly debunk their work. The set-up allowed us to write 9 research papers in … only 3 months.
      http://jjtok.io/3m10p

      […] of the more inventive WordPress adaptations is Commentpress, a WordPress plugin designed to allow many people to discuss a published text, paragraph by […]

      […] Resources & Tutorials• Commentpress Home & Downloads → • Examples of Commentpress in action →Digress.itDigress.it is another interesting and useful plugin, similar in functionality as […]

      Comment by  | 7-days.net on April 26, 2011

      […] Commentpress Home & Downloads → Examples of Commentpress in action → […]

      Comment by Juan Cobo on January 3, 2012

      Hello!I’ve just started to use CommentPress for the website of a book that I’m translating in instalments, a 1614 account of a journey around the world in the closing decades of the sixteenth century. You can see it at http://www.thetouroftheworld.org. Comments and suggestions are very welcome and would be most appreciated.Juan Cobo

      Comment by Christian Wach on January 4, 2012

      Really like your site, Juan. Will email you privately about a few things. Best wishes, Christian.

      Comment by Mad Tomato on March 11, 2012

      This is so amazing…

      Comment by Igor on March 13, 2012

      Cool stuff!!!

      Comment by Nancy moussa on October 3, 2012

      Hi,I have a site setup with old version of wordpress and comment press version 1.4We decided to upgrade to new version of wordpress and new comment press.In my old website I used to select comment press theme it looks like the Holy of Holies example in your site. posts on the left then when you click on one post users are able to add comments to diff paragraph in the window that moves along the doc.The problem I see after I upgrade to new comment press I do not know how to get the same look to the old one.I upgrade the theme, the plugin and Ajax all for new comment press as you suggest in your site.Any thoughts!thanks

      Comment by Nancy moussa on October 3, 2012

      Hi, Just to clarify my previous email, What I would like to say that the look of the comment press theme new one is different than the version 1.4 e.g this link refer to the old one where on the right hand side you can see the widget. When I try to do that for the new theme I did not get the same result.http://web.nmc.org/communication/ any ideas?thanks

      Comment by Christian Wach on October 3, 2012

      You’re right, the theme has changed considerably in the intervening years. There is no current Commentpress theme which looks like the one that shipped with version 1.4, but, as with all open source software, it would be great of you decided to write one 🙂

      If you want to try your hand at it, there’s a starter child theme on GitHub

      Comment by Christian Wach on October 3, 2012

      Just curious, why do you actually want to change it if it’s not broken?

      Comment by Manish on December 7, 2012

      Hi, it is really a very nice plugin and working fine , i really like it.

      Comment by hodanli on January 18, 2013

      this tool is great, thanks.

      Comment by kaffeeringe.de on February 28, 2013

      The German Social Democrativ Party uses Commentspress to discuss parts of their party platform: https://mitreden.akdigitalegesellschaft.de/

      Comment by Christian Wach on February 28, 2013

      Thanks for letting us know

      Comment by pablop on July 31, 2013

      interesante plug

      Comment by sdf on August 14, 2013

      Checking also, great thing !

      Congrats guys 🙂

      Comment by Migue on September 6, 2013

      Great plugin!

      Comment by steve on September 12, 2013

      My Bob Dylan related site, built with CommentPress.   Just completed.   Haven’t publicized it yet.

      Comment by steve on September 12, 2013
      Comment by Christian Wach on September 13, 2013

      Thanks for the link, Steve. I’ll update the list of CommentPress-powered sites when I get a moment.

      Comment by MIke Cosgrave on October 18, 2014

      some of these links are dead now – Gamer theory, Scholarly Publishing by Fitzpatrick are dad, and the future of learning institutions goes to a directory listing; with rummaging, it is possible to find http://futureofthebook.org/HASTAC/learningreport/about/index.html and see it

      Others may also need checking (Oct 2014)

      […] Blogs can also be used to create interactive books that allow individuals to comment on individual sections, chapters, sentences etc. For example, see CommentPress for WordPress (examples here). […]

      Comment by Paige Morgan on September 1, 2015

      This is just a test comment to see how the quote & comment feature works.

      Comment by Robert Fletcher on January 7, 2016

      I’ve used CommentPress in four or five university literature classes to encourage active reading and interpretation. The website I’ve linked on Austen’s Mansfield Park is an example. It’s a wonderful tool. Thanks for maintaining it.

      I also gave a paper about this pedagogical use of CommentPress at the 2014 “Experimental Interfaces for Reading” conference put on by the INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) Project.

      Comment by Christian Wach on January 8, 2016

      Thank you for the kind words and information about the talk Robert. I watched the video and would be very interested in seeing the information on reactions to the interface that you weren’t able to present. Is there a paper on this?

      BTW, I will revamp this page (and indeed the content of the rest of the site!) as soon as I find some free time to do so.

      Comment by A on June 2, 2021

      Attempting one more level

      Comment by Kristin on November 12, 2021

      Yes, it seems that all of the links are broken/dead. 🙁

  • Roadmap (56 comments)

    • Comment by Keith Webster on February 1, 2008

      Hi there,

      We are using WordPress MU at the University of Victoria for distance courses and program community building. Are there any plans for the Commentpress theme to work with WordPress MU?

      Thanks,

      Keith Webster

      Comment by jerome on February 11, 2008

      that would make an amazing tool!

      Comment by dc on March 21, 2008

      One feature I’m really hoping to see is the ability to break up long chapters into multiple pages using the tag (currently supported by wordpress). As it is now, if the post is broken up into multiple pages, a comment for paragraph 3 would be linked to the 3rd paragraph for every page of that chapter, not just to the one page it was meant to be linked to (sorry for the awkward wording there — I hope you can understand!).

      Also, I would love to see some form of footnotes feature implemented as Papier Machine wrote above. Instead, I was forced to write my own footnote script that worked with commentpress.

      Comment by Xavier Normand on June 10, 2008

      What about translation in french?

      Comment by ActualAl on February 24, 2009

      Hi Guys. Forgive my ignorance but after reading the Eduspaces comment does this mean that Commentpress runs on wordpress Mu too??

      Comment by Mark French on October 12, 2009

      I would like to have the option, of displaying the all the paragraphs of the original article side-by-side (contextually) with the comments of a selected individual user.
      This would give greater coherence to the views of individual commentators and would open all sorts of creative possibilities for versioning.

      A great tool!

      Mark

      Comment by Danny on February 3, 2010

      The ability to tag the paragraphs withoiut the <p> tag. Perhaps a different custom tag, as I’d like that every single paragraph seperatly commentable.

      Comment by Danny on February 3, 2010

      Sorry, id like it it every single pararaph WASN’T seperatly commentable by default.

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 17, 2010

      Belatedly: Commentpress has worked with MU since version 3.1

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 17, 2010

      Commentpress has supported multi-page posts since version 3.1. It also seems to work fine with jquery-tooltip.

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 17, 2010

      @ActualAl: yes

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 17, 2010

      This can now be done in version 3.2 – please see the documentation on “comment-blocks”. What you can’t do is mix automatic parsing and manual block division on the same page.

      Comment by Peter Krantz on February 2, 2011

      This looks like an awesome tool! How would one go about structuring several “books” with states in the same WordPress instance? I guess many people have a process that involves several publications. For each there is a beta stage where comments are accepted and taken into consideration after which a new version is published.

      Comment by Christian Wach on February 2, 2011

      My immediate thought would be to use Commentpress in a multisite setup/environment. Each “book” would be equivalent to a “blog”, with new revisions being new blogs.

      How you decide to migrate the content from one revision to the next would be the only slightly tricky part – but you could always just export the blog using the built-in WordPress exporter, I suppose… though that would take all the comments with it. Not too hard to amend what gets exported, however.

      Comment by Jack Dougherty on February 9, 2011

      Christian — in your current version of CommentPress hosted by FOTB, I see a reference to “rollover footnotes” code with Jquery tooltip. But this code does not appear in the CommentPress v3.2 that I recently downloaded. Is it a separate WP plug-in that I need to install? thanks!

      Comment by annette on August 16, 2011

      Jack,
      did you find an answer to this question about rollover footnotes? I’d be interested, as I will have the same issue when i start using this next week.

      Comment by Christian Wach on August 17, 2011

      Yes, here

      Comment by Matthias Andrasch on May 8, 2012

      Great Project!A recent comments feature would be nice to see the latest comments added to a page.Cheers,Matthias

      Comment by Christian Wach on May 9, 2012

      Hi Matthias, for reasons too complicated to explain, the Commentpress you see here is a little out of date. There is now an “Activity” tab which contains (amongst other things depending on context) a recent comments section.

      Comment by Christian Wach on May 9, 2012

      Until I update this site. you can see an install of the latest version here.

      Comment by Norman on May 10, 2012

      We are using CommentPress to create an online commentary to an ancient Greek text at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC.  In order to foster dialogue (rather than simply invite comments) we are asking users to begin each comment with a question.  As each question might receive 10 comments of its own (and thus necessitate a lot of scrolling from question to question), we would like to be able to collapse the “Comments” section in Commentpress such that you see only the questions but must click on them to expand to the proposed answers/comments.  Is this possible? And if so, how do we do it?  If this format is not possible, would it be possible to create a third tab, called Questions, along with Comments and Contents, that would then allow you to comment just as you can comment on paragraphs now?

      Comment by Jack Dougherty on May 10, 2012

      Norman, in case you are not able to find a coding solution before you launch your discussion, take a look at how co-editor Kristen Nawrotzki and I handled a similar issue during the “Essay Idea Discussion” phase of our edited volume, Writing History in the Digital Age. Using CommentPress, we invited contributors to comment on existing ideas and to post new ones (as a comment on the last paragraph on the page). When new topics appeared that warranted further discussion, we would copy & paste them from the comment into the main text and designate each with its own number. 

      Comment by Zelph16 on September 17, 2012

      I’m using this wonderful plugin and theme in a large book with several chapters and sub-chapters. I would like to have the option to collapse the menu on Contents tab so it shows just main chapters and when click on one chapter it shows the sub-chapters.

      Comment by Christian Wach on September 17, 2012

      On the Commentpress admin page, in the “Table of Contents” section, set “Chapters are” to “Headings”. This has two effects:

      a) It collapses the Contents list in the way you want

      b) It takes all but the lowest level pages out of the “flow” of the document

      Comment by Richard on November 4, 2012

      Is it possible to obscure the identity of commenters?  I may wish to use CommentPress in a social science context where the confidentiality of participants is required.   Seems like it would be possible to tweak the form to achieve this.

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 4, 2012

      Hi Richard – do you mean that commenters need not leave their name, or that commenters names are not shown on the website?

      Comment by Tom on November 8, 2012

      I changed the setting from pages to headings, this results in not being able to view the main page that is the parent page, but does collapse the menu and allows for viewing the child pages. .. so, it’s not a solution for me, because I have content on the parent page that needs to be seen.

      Comment by Tom on November 8, 2012

      I would like to have another sidebar in which we can put other widgets preferably on the left side of the content.

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 8, 2012

      Tom: you cannot have a collapsible menu and content in the page hierarchy – it’s one or the other at the moment. Only pages with no children can have content when the hierarchy describes their “grouping”. There are plans to offer a different Contents list – one with “discovery triangles” perhaps – that allows hierarchy and content, but this is still on the to-do list.

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 8, 2012

      Thanks for the feedback. You’ll need to make a child theme to do this.

      Comment by steve on November 10, 2012

      how hard would it be for a person to create some program that would add a zillion comments to a site using this theme, thereby causing lots of problems.  (I’m working on a site using this theme – that thought just came to me.  i’d hate all the work to get wrecked.) thanks 

      Comment by Mauricio Delfin on November 22, 2012

      Hi Christian, — Congratulations on such a useful tool! — I wanted to ask you what the best way to translate CommentPress into Spanish would be (I noticed “Internationalisation and translation” is done). I have most of my content up on the my site, but I would like to translate the “comments”, “contents”, “Name (required)” “0 comments on paragraph 2”, and all of those terms used in WordPress/CommentPress.— Thank you in advance for all your help!

      Comment by Jason Samuels on February 4, 2013

      Would love if the table of contents automatically expanded to the page currently open. Also would like the ability to place a NextGen gallery widget in an additional tab in right-hand sidebar.

      Comment by steve on October 3, 2013

      RSS Feed would nice.  Or is it already there and i just don’t see it?

      Comment by Christian Wach on October 3, 2013

      Hi Steve, there are auto-discovery feeds for

      1. the site
      2. site comments
      3. the viewed page/post

      in the HTML head. Were there any others you were after?

      Comment by Ajax on November 22, 2013

      Ajax posting of the comments without re-loading the page is very much needed.

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 22, 2013

      It is done and has been for a while. I just haven’t updated this page for a long time. Sorry for the confusion.

      Comment by Christopher Stein on November 24, 2013

      Is it possible to allow multimedia in the comments such as inserting images or even sound or video?

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 25, 2013

      Not at present, Christopher. I will look into making the HTML editor an option. The comment form now includes the “Add Media” button for those with the appropriate capabilities.

      Comment by Keith on March 17, 2014

      Sort of in the same vein as Richard above, I was wondering if there was a way to make comments private. The idea is that if we post a document, we want plenty of community input. But, we don’t want those comments visible to all users, just to the person who posted their document. This is specifically geared toward people commenting on academic works-in-progress, so critiques are not aired fully in public, but can be helpful for whoever posted their work. Any guidance or referrals you can give would be great!

      Comment by Christian Wach on March 18, 2014

      This is of course possible, but would require some sort of custom coding to achieve what you’re after. There is no built-in facility for this in CommentPress.

      Comment by Ramon on July 25, 2014

      Hi,I Would love to use commentpress on a specific section of my site. So only when you click on a menu item ‘review’ the theme of commentpress is enabled. On other pages, the normal page is loaded. The problem now is that when you activate the plugin, the whole site is using the commentpress theme.Thanks for your great work!Ramon 

      Comment by Christian Wach on July 29, 2014

      Hi Ramon – it’s for historical reasons that the plugin takes over the whole of a WordPress site: it was coded to create sites that were “documents”. It would either need some work done on the plugin to implement what you want, or you could use a WordPress multisite install where a sub-blog is CommentPress-enabled.

      Comment by Daniel TORRES on August 19, 2014

      I am testing CommentPress, and I like it.Is it possible to have several documents? I am doing so by having different documents under the ToC instead of chapters… I have to see how to rename ToC for Documents instead.Also How to disable customise or hide the special pages in the menu? I don’t use the blog for instance.

      Comment by Christian Wach on August 26, 2014

      Hi Daniel, there are a number of ways to achieve what you want. It depends on your larger goals. With CommentPress, each WordPress “blog” or “site” is considered a “document”, so the simplest way to have multiple docs is to create a multisite version of WordPress, where each site/blog in your network is a CommentPress document. There are fairly comprehensive instructions on the WordPress repo.

      Altering the content of the Special Pages menu can be done through the use of the actions and filters that are present in the theme. You’ll either need to create a child theme or plugin for this purpose as there’s no UI for doing so as yet.

      Comment by Brittney Drakeford on November 3, 2014

      I work for a county agency and we are interested in using Commentpress on our website to allow the public to comment on draft documents. Does comment press only work with text files? Or can Commentpress also be used on a pdf document?

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 3, 2014

      CommentPress won’t work with PDFs – you would have to convert the content to HTML and import it into WordPress.

      Comment by Brittney Drakeford on November 3, 2014

      Thanks. Now once the PDF is converted into HTML, will Commentpress still preserve the layout of the HTML doc?

      It’s possible to convert a PDF to an HTML doc and keep your photographs/texts/layout. I just wanted to see if Commentpress would preserve this as well.

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 3, 2014

      Complicated layouts are probably beyond the scope of CommentPress, but you can test its capabilities with the WordPress Theme Unit Test. For a preview of such a test, have a look at this test site.

      Comment by Jonathan Shapiro on January 15, 2015

      I’m with Ramon. I’d like to be able to activate CommentPress on a document-by-document basis. I like the functionality quite a lot, but I’m definitely not okay with the fact that it takes over my site design completely.

      Some of the function seems unnecessary and duplicative. I’ve already got provision for a table of contents, for example. It’s not clear to me (though I suspect there’s a reason) why CP has any need to know about the document as a whole rather than simply associating comments with a particular page.

      CommentPress is excellent work. This frustrates me, because I’d really like to use what you’ve done, but I’m going to have to substantially re-work the plugin to do so. Even if that’s the case, though, thanks so much for your excellent work. Sometimes knowing it can be done is most of the battle. Having an example to work from is icing on the cake.

      Comment by Christian Wach on January 15, 2015

      Jonathan, have a look at Islamic History Commons, which, in combination with Commons in a Box and BP Working Papers implements something like the system you seem to be describing. You can then host any number of “papers” on your site.

      Comment by Gerrit Jan on August 25, 2015

      Hi, I would like to ask the same question as Mauricio Delfin above, but for a different language: how to go about translating the plugin into Dutch? Do I need to check the different plugin files and translate any strings I encounter, or do I need to work on a translation file? Thanks in advance.

      Comment by Christian Wach on August 29, 2015

      Your best bet is to use a plugin such as Loco Translate. If you’d like to contribute your translation to the plugin (which would be greatly appreciated) I believe you can export the .po and .mo files and send them to me.

      Cheers, Christian

      Comment by Bret Mulligan on August 3, 2016

      I agree it would be nice to have the option of hiding the name of commentators to remove clutter from the page.

      Comment by Léo on December 1, 2020

      Hello,

      Can we request the implementation of infinite loader (both page and single page) ?

      Greetings,

      L.

      Comment by Christian Wach on December 15, 2020

      Can we request the implementation of infinite loader (both page and single page

      Much of the code for this exists in the plugin; it’s just disabled at the moment. I’d love to revisit it.

  • Formatting Your Document (43 comments)

    • Comment by K.G. Schneider on July 22, 2007

      Many journalists I know refer to “graphs.” A “paragraph” could be the larger term. Or to be clearer, change the term for the aggregated paragraphs — perhaps call them “comment sections.”

      Comment by ben vershbow on July 27, 2007

      Another option: Jack Slocum, whose own granular commenting system very much influenced Commentpress, calls them “blocks”.

      Comment by Patri Friedman on September 9, 2007

      It’s awesome that you use paragraph tags, I wrote my own commenting system many years ago in perl and it also used paragraph breaks. So hopefully I can port my book draft over to Comment Press with minimal reformatting required.

      Comment by Andrew on March 16, 2009

      This is an interesting piece of software – looks fantastic for this kind of thing actually.

      […] tools is actually a pretty clever and simple extension of WordPress, called Commentpress. It links the comments to specific paragraphs in a post, displaying the two side-by-side not […]

      Comment by Dan Weinstein on May 24, 2009

      I like “blocks” myself. I also like “units” or “sense unit”.

      Comment by Dot on September 28, 2009

      I have a document that includes many bulleted lists, and Commentpress is essentially useless because there is no way to indicate that a list is a paragraph. Doesn’t help to add tags around the list. Makes me very sad, as Commentpress is so useful otherwise.

      Comment by Dave Ferguson on April 21, 2010

      “Lexias” is cute, from an obscurity point of view.  I get the concern about “paragraph.” 

      If I follow, text blocks (like <p>, <ol>, <ul>) are commentable.  Is blockquote?

      What if you have an embedded ul?  As in:
      <ul><li>blah blah
      <li>blah blah
      <ul><li>sub-blah blah
      <li>sub-blah blah
      </ul><li>Back to the main blah
      </ul>

      I’m not sure that’s necessary, just wondering.  From the example, it seems the comments apply to the <ul> tag, not the subsequent <li> tags.

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 17, 2010

      @Dot: Commentpress 3.2 has two ways to generate commentable blocks -either leave the text as is and it’ll parse <p>, <ul> and <ol> tags, or use the new “comment-block” divider in the edit page screen to arbitrarily sub-divide your text.

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 17, 2010

      @Dave: sub-lists break Commentpress at the moment. Sorry about that – we’ll look more closely at it and see what’s possible.

      Comment by Mark Walters on April 14, 2011

      Can’t get vimeo video to embed. Can someone supply more details on how to do this? Thanks. Mark

      Comment by John on April 4, 2012

      How does one change the green background to a different color or texture? I tried changing all the colors in the css files but only managed to change the header somehow.

      Comment by Christian Wach on April 8, 2012

      The definition of the colour for the body background is in layout.css, but you can override it in a number of ways: use a child theme and define your body colour there, or use the custom.css file to put your overridden style in.

      Comment by John on April 10, 2012

      Thanks for replying. One other question: the logo image repeats itself on monitor resolutions greater than 1600 (mine’s 1920). The header tab does not give us the option to control this. Thanks!

      Comment by Christian Wach on April 11, 2012

      Add this to custom.css, or in your child theme:

      body #book_header {
      background-repeat: no-repeat;
      }

      Comment by John on April 18, 2012

      Is there a way to add blog categories on the right along with or instead of archives? Also, how does one add social media icons or an RSS feed?

      Comment by Christian Wach on April 18, 2012

      Not via the admin interface, I’m afraid. You’d have to code it.

      Comment by John on April 18, 2012

      Thanks for replying. Your advice on my earlier questions helped me greatly.Let’s say I wanted to put two icons in the header area with its own css boxes, which file or css item should I look for? Wish there was a way I could add blog categories along with the archives tab – that would make it almost like two documents within a blog!

      Comment by Christian Wach on April 19, 2012

      Hi John – first off, if you have an Archive tab, then you’re running an outdated version of the theme and plugin. The Archive tab was removed in favour of an Activity tab in Commentpress 3.3. For obvious reasons, I’d recommend upgrading.

      You’ll find the code for the icons in a file called navigation.php, which is in the ‘style/templates’ sub-directory of the theme. The images you’ll need to replicate are in ‘style/images/buttons’. And the CSS controlling them is in layout.css, though you’ll want to look at layout.dev.css for a readable version.

      I think I see where you want to go with your modifications – if you contact me directly, I may be able to help you customise your install more robustly.

      Comment by John on April 20, 2012

      Oh no. I have 3.2.1…but when I clicked download it takes me to the same github page with version 3.2.1. Where can I find 3.3.1?

      Comment by Christian Wach on April 20, 2012

      Github always has the latest code for the theme and plugins. Just download them again from their Github pages.

      Comment by Mark Pearson on November 20, 2012

      Is there a ‘minifier’ application to generate style-overrides.css from style-overrides.dev.css ?

      Comment by Mark Pearson on November 20, 2012

      Woops. I should read the file comments more carefully ….When you’re happy, use a minifier such as http://www.refresh-sf.com/yui/ to compress your CSS and paste it into `style-overrides.css`.

      Comment by Steve Taylor on December 20, 2012

      When I insert the commentblock tag before each sentence (with no space after it), only the entire paragraph is commentable. If I add a space after each commentblock tag, each sentence is commentable, but the text is no longer formatted as a paragraph, i.e. each sentence is followed by a line break. Can’t I make each sentence commentable while keeping the paragraph format?

      Comment by Christian Wach on December 20, 2012

      Yes, sure, depending on the version of CommentPress you’re using. If you’re using CommentPress Core from the WP plugin directory, then just switch the format of the page to “Poetry”.

      Comment by Christian Wach on December 20, 2012

      BTW, commentblock tags are intended for grouping multiple paragraphs together, rather than subdividing paragraphs into smaller parts.

      Comment by Christian Wach on December 20, 2012

      Sorry, Steve, I misunderstood your question. No, I’m sorry, but making sentences within paragraphs commentable is not currently possible. Poetry-style formatting makes lines within paragraphs commentable, but they must each be new lines, not run together as prose.

      Comment by John Lott on January 7, 2013

      Hi, I have a basic question:  My paragraphs are correctly marked with numbers and bubbles, but the comment’s tab says “comments closed.”  Am I missing something that I need to throw to activate the comments?

      Comment by Christian Wach on January 9, 2013

      It sounds like comments are disabled for that post. You should find an option for that on the post’s edit screen.

      Comment by Gabrielle Sutherland on March 9, 2013

      I have the same problem as John Lott but I’m still in the setup phase, and I’m not on a Post but a Page. How do I set up pages so I don’t have “Comments Closed”  ?

      btw–this is a marvelous theme and plugin.  You are what I have been looking for!

       

      Thank you,

      Gabrielle

      Comment by Jake on April 5, 2013

      Just wanted to see what a reply to a reply looks like.

      Comment by Jake on April 5, 2013

      And then a reply to a reply to a reply!

      Comment by Jake on April 5, 2013

      This can maybe go on forever!

      Comment by Mark on January 15, 2014

      Hi Christian, I was wondering if its possible to have pages where the only option is to have a page comment? And is there a tag for making a paragraph etc uncommentable ie the opposite of the comment block tag?

      Love the plugin by the way. I’m hopeing to make good use of it on an online research module I am developing, so thanks for creating it.

      Cheers, Mark

      Comment by Christian Wach on January 17, 2014

      Hi Mark – at present there is no way to disable paragraph-level commenting on individual pages. I will add it as a feature request and try and include that in the next version. Thanks for the suggestion.

      Cheers, Christian

      Comment by Robbin Warner on May 8, 2014

       I get the “comments Closed” starting on chapter 9.  I can’t figure out what’s happening.  The comments work great for chapters 1-8.  

      Comment by Robbin Warner on May 8, 2014

       The comments aren’t disabled.  It seems as if I just ran out of comment room and comments just itself down from that point forward

      Comment by Robbin Warner on May 8, 2014

       I want to thank Christian at Future of the Book for his immediate assistance.  It turned out there was yet another place where comments can be turned on or off that I didn’t know about.  This is how I fixed it.  I went to the page in WordPress that lists all your pages.  There I selected all the pages and went to the BULK ACTIONS tab.  From there I went to EDIT.  With all the pages chosen, I clicked on APPLY next to the EDIT option.  Here I found another  Comments option tab.  I clicked on ALLOW and SAVE.  Once I did this all the comments worked.  

      Comment by Christian Wach on May 8, 2014

      You’re welcome Robbin!

      Comment by VN LoLordo on May 13, 2015

      [I mistakenly left this comment elsewhere, but this now seems like the best place]

      I’m trying to set up a 19th century novel for collective annotation, and running into one problem:  this text has lots of dialogue and few speech prefixes–which means it’s full of one-sentence paragraphs.  Eliminating them damages readability; retaining them makes for a terribly busy interface.

      Is there a feature I’m missing where I can shut off commenting within a page (I’m using one page for each chapter of the text)?

      Is adding large numbers of commentblocks to chunk content my best best?

      Thanks!  Nick

      Comment by Christian Wach on May 14, 2015

      Hi Nick, have you considered using “comment blocks” instead of relying on auto-formatting?

      When you’re creating or editing your pages, you should see an “Insert a Comment Block” button which will allow you to group your single sentence paragraphs into larger commentable blocks. The only limitation with this method is that you’ll have to divide up the whole page with these separators. See paragraph 2 on this page for details.

      Comment by VN LoLordo on May 14, 2015

      Yes, that makes sense.  I had been adding individual comment blocks and finding that they didn’t work well with paragraph breaks, so I’d neglected the comment block feature.  But I think it’s the way to go…thanks!

      Comment by Christian Wach on May 14, 2015

      No problem. Let me know how you get on and if you run into further issues, post me an URL and I’ll see if I can suggest anything else.

  • Download (21 comments)

    • Comment by Rebecca on July 10, 2008

      This is a great idea!

      Comment by Giovani Spagnolo on October 2, 2008

      I am very pleased to see this. It has been a long time we are working on something similar, but as a standalone app, fully open source (gnu affero gplv3). Feel frre to contact me if you need some help (specially UI and UX).

      Comment by jonair on May 4, 2009

      “a content license selector” sounds great! but i couldn’t find out anything @ “Commentpress options page” except ‘The title for table of contents’ and ‘ The slug of post to appear as welcome message’. am i in the wrong page?
      Also, in s.korea, we have similar license scheme like CCL. can i add it to the selection?

      btw, i really hope to localize it into korean. where can i reach ‘internationalization support’ so that i start to translate?

      thanks

      Comment by Plouin on January 5, 2010

      paragraphe génial

      Comment by B on February 26, 2010

      This is a test post wanting to see how this looks.

      Comment by Yusuf on March 1, 2010

      Hi,

      While trying to activate this on wordpress 2.9.2 it gives the error ‘The plugin does not have a valid header.’.

      Any solution to this?

      Thanks,

      Comment by Christian Wach on March 2, 2010

      I don’t get this error on 2.9.2, and AFAIK, WordPress plugin headers haven’t changed format. Can you give bit more information on your installation environment?

      Comment by Tim on October 14, 2010

      FYI, the file cp_latest.zip has a bunch of hidden system files in it that you will probably want to get rid of.  These are all hidden system files:  There is a folder titled “_MACOSX” also in cp_latest there is .DS_STORE, and in themes/commentpress there is .InterarchyMirrorCacheData, etc…

      Comment by Christian Wach on October 15, 2010

      Thanks Tim, will look into it. We’re not far off releasing a new and updated version.

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 17, 2010

      Belatedly: CP is compatible with the WPLicence plugin. Internationalisation is in the pipeline.

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 17, 2010

      Tim: the new version of CP is now up – no more rogue files and a host of new goodies instead.

      Comment by Matt on December 19, 2010

      And, as I should have said above, THANK YOU for your work!

      Comment by Matt on December 19, 2010

      Apologies, Christian — I hadn’t uploaded the plugin. Still having problems with display, but no longer getting error messages about undefined calls. Feel free to delete my comments above (except for the thank you, which still stands!)

      Comment by Christian Wach on December 20, 2010

      Comments duly deleted… thanks for the thanks… if you want me to take a look at the remaining issues, let me know. Christian

      […] Permalink for this paragraph 0 Until such time as we can rewrite the Commentpress theme to accommodate the admin bar, it seems sensible to disable it. To that end, there is a new version of Commentpress available for download. […]

      Comment by Kevin Schmidt on November 18, 2011

      This is another test post wanting to see how a comment to a comment looks like.

      Comment by Steve on December 2, 2011

      Hello .. nice tool 

      Comment by Nancy moussa on September 24, 2012

      Hi, I wonder if there is a version of commentPress that works with updated version of wordpress 3.4.2 Thanks

      Comment by Christian Wach on September 24, 2012

      The current version available here works just fine, Nancy.

      Comment by Fredrick Muriuki on August 8, 2019

      noma sana maze!

      Comment by test on October 10, 2024

      [ Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 CommentPress Core on GitHub]

      check

  • Installation (21 comments)

    • Comment by Commentpress » Download on January 25, 2008

      […] Installation […]

      Comment by Roberto Pettinato on November 28, 2009

      interesting

      Comment by demetri on December 18, 2009

      Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /users/leaf3/users/web/irtemed/web/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/commentpress/class_commentpress_display.php on line 1546

      Comment by Kevin Lim on January 17, 2010

      Same problem as demetri. He’s probably using the latest WP install, 2.9.1, like me. Are there any solutions to this?

      Comment by admin on January 22, 2010

      Thanks to Kevin’s input, we now seem to have fixed this. Download cp_latest.zip for an updated plugin.

      […] See more here: Commentpress » Installation […]

      Comment by M Farrington on September 16, 2011

      I’m wondering how I can get to the CSS to change basic things like the footer color and such. I’ve gone to the Admin dashboard and then to the Editing part of the interface, but the custom CSS appears hidden.

      Comment by Christian Wach on September 16, 2011

      I’d recommend creating a child theme to override styles, but if you need to edit the css in the theme from the WordPress backend, you should just be able to add your style overrides in either style.css or custom.css

      Comment by M Farrington on September 16, 2011

      Thanks – will try that today.

      Comment by steve on October 26, 2012

      so far so good – i am so excited to try out this software.  (i tried using digress.it first – very buggy).  The installation went well – except – step 12 and 13 and 14.  I can’t find the checkbox “create special pages”.  ?  can anybody help? it seems simple to do, but…  i’ve never used WP before, maybe i’m missing something obvious.  

      Comment by Christian Wach on October 26, 2012

      Oops, documentation is out-of-date. No need to create the “special pages” any more – they’re auto created for you when you enable the plugin.

      Comment by steve on October 26, 2012

      thanks! i was still puzzling over this issue.  now i can rest easy :-)this is so interesting!  

      Comment by Christian Wach on October 26, 2012

      Thanks for pointing out the error, Steve.

      Comment by Mark Pearson on November 19, 2012

      CommentPress Core version 3.4 (with WP 3.4.2 multisite mode, and BuddyPress 1.6) throws a fatal error when attempting to activate on a system running php 5.4.

      Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.Fatal error: Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed in /usr/home/markp/www/esp/wp-content/plugins/commentpress-core/commentpress-core/class_commentpress.php on line 530

      This is a php 5.4 Call-time pass by reference error (eg http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8971261/php-5-4-call-time-pass-by-reference-easy-fix-available)Here’s the code: 529 // use method in this class
      530 $this->options_help( &$screen );
      I think that changing to :$this->options_help( $screen );and settingfunction options_help(&$screen)will do the job although I have not tried this yet.

      Comment by Martin Castle on November 20, 2012

      I’m wondering where the new version is showcased, as I like the look of it.Lots.

      Comment by Mark Pearson on November 20, 2012

      The fix in version 3.4.1 fixed this problem a treat! Thanks for the quick response.

      Comment by Peter on June 8, 2013

      Hi,

      I get the following error when trying to submit a comment:

      Ajax error! TypeError: Cannot call method ‘split” of undefined

      What am I doing wrong?

      thanks

      Comment by Peter on June 8, 2013

      Forget my last comment,

      I was trying to comment on a pages that hadn’t been published yet duh!

      Comment by Christian Wach on July 9, 2013

      Hi Martin, sorry about the wait – it’s finally here on this site.

      Comment by David on June 10, 2014

      Greetings – Is there a way to edit the special pages menu in the current version? Thanks! d-

      Comment by Christian Wach on June 10, 2014

      Only by using a child theme or plugin, but either way it’s a little technical. If you want to have a go, it’s the filter ‘cp_template_navigation’ that you want to look at. Return the path to your adapted copy of the special pages menu file and edit away.

  • How to read a CommentPress document (17 comments)

    • Comment by elan on January 14, 2011

      I am trying out CommentPress on a WP 3.0.3 installation as a Network/MU and also have Buddypress 1.2.7 installed.
      I do not see the top navigation bar.  And as a matter of fact it looks like the CommentPress header and the Buddypress navigation conflict with each other.
      Any ideas?
       

      Comment by Christian Wach on January 14, 2011

      Sorry, but Commentpress has not been developed with Buddypress in mind, nor has it ever been tested with it. I am aware that the admin bar that is enabled by default in WP3.1 conflicts with the Commentpress navigation bar, so the plugin disables the admin bar for now. I am considering the options with regard to this, but can’t see a solution at present because both are absolutely positioned at the top of the page by default.

      Comment by Timothy Burke on February 22, 2011

      Is there a way to have the Table of Contents be the default display in the right hand column rather than Comments? I’m trying to use Commentpress for an entire class of students working on research papers. I’m going to assign each of them a parent page with several child pages (abstract & topic, research notes, draft). Having the Table of Contents up makes it a lot easier to navigate between students and see the total range of pages on site.

      Comment by Christian Wach on February 23, 2011

      No, at present this isn’t possible. You could perhaps use multiple tabs to do what you want, with the TOC visible in the ‘master’ tab and open pages in new tabs instead of the same window.

      Comment by annette on August 17, 2011

      can i copy this page and put it into my own document as a guide for readers?
       

      Comment by Christian Wach on April 13, 2012

      It’s been a while, so please ignore if you’ve moved on, but I thought I’d let you know that Commentpress is now compatible with BuddyPress via BP-Groupblog and an additional plugin. The relevant packages are available on Github.

      Comment by Clive on April 19, 2014

      Very, very nice. I’m writing research pages which require feedback on paragraphs and this is great.

      As this is so good AND focuses you to paragraphs I was wondering if you knew if any of the ‘in line / front end’ editors were compatible with and worked with this plugin?

      Comment by Christian Wach on April 19, 2014

      I have just tested CommentPress with WordPress Front-end Editor and unfortunately it doesn’t work as expected. I’ll look into this and see what can be done.

      Comment by Clive on April 19, 2014

      Haha – yea I just found that out too. BUT this one (below) does seem to work and it doesn’t seem to interfer with CommentPress either. Fantastic.

      http://scribu.net/wordpress/front-end-editor/

      Comment by Christian Wach on April 19, 2014

      Thanks for the report, Clive. I’ve also opened a ticket for the WordPress Front-end Editor folks to investigate.

      Comment by Clive on April 19, 2014

      Sorry Christian I spoke to soon I can edit and the comments icons are there BUT I cannot access (open) the comments in the comment list. I’ll leave a comment on this plugins support page and see what happens. CommentPress is making a big difference getting feedback and refining pages.

      Comment by Christian Wach on April 19, 2014

      I get Javascript errors when using Scribu’s FEE, which would explain why the comment list fails to open. The content is peppered with [empty]. Sorry about that, but glad to hear that CommentPress is helping your cause.

      Comment by Al Jones on June 22, 2015

      So, okay, my site isn’t a WP site, but I’m putting one together that is.

      Comment: most of your link in the Examples are dead … probably should go back and try those again.

      This looked interesting since my vet (the one for whom I’m putting this site together) wants to be able to post unusual procedures that they’ve performed in the clinic.  But not allowing the use of an existing template leave me cold (as a developer) and the entire concept of commenting by paragraph is definitely overkill.

      Feel free to educate me if you will //al

      Comment by Christian Wach on June 23, 2015

      Thanks for the feedback on the links, Al. You’re right that CommentPress certainly isn’t for everybody – we tried to make paragraph level commenting applicable to other themes, but there were always too many unknowns to do so reliably. Hence the custom parent themes.

      Comment by Nick on October 7, 2015

      I’m confused:  what has happened to these two features in the current version of Commentpress?

      Comment by Christian Wach on October 9, 2015

      Sorry Nick I need to update the screenshots. The functionality still exists in the “modern” theme, however – look at the links under “Special Pages”.

      Comment by Nick on October 18, 2015

      ah, OK–thanks!

  • Structuring your Document (16 comments)

    • Comment by Ken on January 5, 2011

      test comment this is what a comment should look like.

      Comment by Eduvator on June 26, 2011

      Checking how Commet Press works…

      Comment by sean on December 4, 2011

      Replying to a reply.

      Comment by Mark Pearson on November 20, 2012

      I have a bunch of comments about the configuration of CommentPress here:http://wp-bp.tiddlyspace.com/#%5b%5bCommentPress%20configuration%5d%5d

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 20, 2012

      Thanks for the feedback – what is the best way to respond on tiddlyspace? Inline wiki edits?

      In general, IIRC, you’re using CP and BuddyPress together? If so, the header colours are supposed to coordinate with blog type and workflow status – i.e. whether a groupblog is prose or poetry and whether it has the (experimental) translation workflow enabled. If it’s a sub site that’s not a groupblog, then header colour ought to be configurable.

      The state of confusion is largely because CommentPress has had theme customisation (of a sort) since WP2.5 and keeping all those legacy installs happy requires the combination of customizer, header and background pages. I’ll do better version detection in a future version, which migrates the old settings to customizer ones.

      Comment by Giang le on November 21, 2012

      Testting this wonderful plugin!

      Comment by Jon on December 20, 2012

      ermahgehrt this is pretty cool.

      Comment by Gabrielle Sutherland on March 9, 2013

      What do we do to reconfigure the height of the header?  We can’t figure out where to go or what to do to edit this–help!

      Comment by Christian Wach on March 11, 2013

      There are no user-configurable options to do this. You’ll need to create a child theme and start from there. Please see my reply on wordpress.org.

      Comment by Pietro on March 28, 2013

      Nope, i cant figure out where is the setting to show subpages.. it puts all the pages in the same level..

      Comment by Christian Wach on March 28, 2013

      Pietro: there’s a checkbox on the CommentPress Core settings page. Go to:

      Settings → CommentPress Core

      … and look for Show Sub-Pages under Table of Contents.

      If that doesn’t work, then are you sure your pages actually have a hierarchy?

      Comment by Pietro on March 28, 2013

      No checkbox, only this:

      NOTE! When Chapters are Pages, the TOC will always show Sub-Pages, since collapsing the TOC makes no sense in that situation

      and yes, i have 2 child of
      Title Page

      Comment by Pietro on March 28, 2013

      SOLVED

      just it wont show the hierarchy if u put child of the “homepage redirected” page 😉

      Comment by Christian Wach on March 28, 2013

      Okay, so is your TO set to show Pages?

      And do what do you have for “Chapters are”?

      BTW, just checking about the pages… you’d be surprised etc…

      Comment by Christian Wach on March 28, 2013

      Ah, yes, thanks – that’s recently been pointed out to me. The Title Page is put in to the list separately, without its child pages. I’ll fix that in the next release.

      Glad you’re sorted.

      Comment by Daniel Garcia on October 29, 2018

      Awesome initiative

  • General Comments (11 comments)

    • Comment by Chart on December 6, 2009

      I think this works great….

      Comment by demetri on December 18, 2009

      After installing commentpress and following the directions, I’m getting a “fatal error” in the coding. Any advice on this?

      Comment by Amanda French on September 11, 2010

      The theme is broken with WordPress 3.0. I did adapt it so that it works to some extent (see the site URL I’ve given), but I couldn’t get the paragraph-level commenting to work and so I removed it altogether from the plugin & theme. I left “General Comments” enabled and renamed it “Comments on the Book.” Let me know if you want the code and I’ll be happy to give it to you — I like the “bookishness” of the CommentPress theme enough to forego the paragraph-level commenting.

      Comment by Joel on December 11, 2012

      Any outside chance that you guys could do a Blogger version?

      Comment by Christian Wach on December 11, 2012

      I don’t see how that would be achievable. Blogger is a closed system.

      Comment by Joel on December 11, 2012

      How so? You can edit all the code without paying, unlike WordPress.

      Comment by Christian Wach on December 12, 2012

      CommentPress is for self-hosted WordPress installs, not wordpress.com

      Comment by steve on November 22, 2013

      I’ve been using CommentPress for my site for some time now.  I think it’s a brilliant tool.    I thought I’d give my 2 cents on what could be improved.

      I think the major “problem” is with the layout of the front page.  It’s not very “inviting”, as some of my readers have said.  And I agree.  

      First, there needs to be an easy way to change the colors.  The current ones are too dark. I know I can create a child theme, but that’s not exactly straight-forward with CommentPress.  It’s hard to figure out the style sheets.

      More importantly, I think the general layout needs to change.  I think it would be better if the items on the left-hand side were moved to the Header.  Table of Contents could be a drop-down menu of some sort.  The items under “Special pages would go to the right of the Table of Contents.  It would probably make sense to move “Activity” to the header as well.

      This change would solve two major issues. First, it would provide more reading room for the page.   That would make the page easier to read, and not look so squished.  Also, the items under Special Pages would be much easier to find.   And it would focus attention on the main point – the text and the comments.

      Just something to consider, just my thoughts.   I know making these type of changes would be difficult.  CommentPress is complicated (I’ve been looking through the code! Whoa.)

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 25, 2013

      Many thanks for your thoughtful comments, Steve, you feedback is greatly appreciated.

      I certainly agree that the homepage template needs to be more inviting and/or functional. It has always been assumed that people would do that themselves, though perhaps too much technical knowledge has also been assumed. I will have a think about that, however, and see if I can make some quick improvements.

      As far as child themes go, there is a starter child theme which even I use to customise sites to suit a particular colour scheme. The default grey palette is deliberately muted so that it doesn’t get in the way of designers too much. I am reluctant to go too far down the road of offering back-end configurable color schemes for a number of reasons, but mostly because it would require considerable effort. Time for a crowdfunding campaign, perhaps?

      Regarding the design changes you suggest, I have taken them on board and whilst I’m not promising to implement them, I will bear them in mind when I do get the opportunity to do further updates.

      Thanks again for your feedback.

      Comment by steve on November 25, 2013

      Thanks for taking to the time to respond.  I’m not sure my suggestions would be helpful in reality, but something to think about anyway.    And yea,  I understand the amount of work.

      I was checking out my site on my new android, and i see that NAVIGATE, CONTENTS, DISCUSS appear in the footer. interesting.  that seems to work well.  i like it. 

      I started to look into making some modifications myself, but quickly found it was a bit over my head.  I was able to install a child theme, and edit the CSS a bit, although i found even that a challenge.  I decide to work on some simpler themes first, do some reading, and return to it when i understand it more.  I’m starting to get a much better idea of how to go about things.

      Comment by Christian Wach on November 27, 2013

      Happy to hear you’re getting the hang of things. CommentPress is not as friendly as it could be for less technical folks. Hang on in there and it will become clearer.

      Glad you like the responsive elements to the design. In fact, you could trigger them at larger screen sizes if you prefer the layout. Try making your desktop browser window smaller and you’ll see the design change to be a bit more like what you’re seeing on your mobile device. I’ll investigate how straightforward it would be to make that an admin option if it appeals.

Comments on the Blog

  • A new look to the sidebar (2 comments)

    • Comment by Joel on December 15, 2011

      Dumb question probably, but can I install Commentpress on a regular old WordPress blog if I have WordPress Pro?

      Comment by Christian Wach on December 21, 2011

      By “WordPress Pro”, I assume you mean a premium service on wordpress.com. If that’s the case, then no, I’m sorry, that’s probably not possible. As far as I know, you can only use Commentpress on a standalone WordPress install.

  • Hello world! (1 comment)

  • A multipage post (1 comment)

Source: https://futureofthebook.org/commentpress/all-comments/