Formatting Your Document
¶ 1
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CommentPress breaks up content into a commentable form in two ways: by default, it splits according to paragraph breaks and lists ( <p>
, <ol>
, <ul>
). WordPress automatically inserts paragraph tags into your document when it detects two line breaks. This works well for most texts.
¶ 2
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You can also split content by using a ‘quicktag’ separator in the text (<--commentblock-->
). The HTML and Rich-text Editors in WordPress both have a ‘commentblock’ button to help you do this should you choose this method. Please note: you can use either splitting method on a page, but not both.
- ¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0
- Lets go ahead and
- Test whether we get
- Comment icons on
- An unordered list
- ¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0
- And lets also
- Test if we get
- Comment icons on
- An ordered list
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 5 We realize that when you reorganize things in this way the term “paragraph” begins to get a bit wobbly. We thought of calling them “lexias” (units of reading) but that seemed a little too obscure. Let us know if you have any other ideas.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Please note: headings and other more elaborate formatting will not be picked up as a text block on which comments can be left. Part of the reason for this is the way a text block is represented — headings often do not have enough content to distinguish one from another. We would appreciate feedback on which tags would be most useful to make commentable.
¶ 7
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If you want to make video and Flash embeds and images commentable, then wrap them in a paragraph. If you want Flash embeds to scroll nicely under the header, don’t forget to add the <param name="wmode" value="opaque" />
parameter. For example:
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 1
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 Paragraph links: you can link to a particular paragraph in the same document by copying the adjoining speech bubble’s link and then add the ‘cp_para_link’ class to make it scroll nicely. Links to other pages work just the same.
¶ 11
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<a href="#pePnhaomefwnbpuaatbowcclPotrftiwrodhectdofaWwaftmumc" class="cp_para_link">Your link text</a>
produces Your link text
¶ 12
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<a href="http://futureofthebook.org/commentpress/about-commentpress/#pEsHoHphbcfutrCaapstcspwiiacmspNsfhcucsiwctwshpuWinp">Link to other page</a>
produces Link to other page
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.
This is an interesting piece of software – looks fantastic for this kind of thing actually.
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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!
Add this to custom.css, or in your child theme:
body #book_header {
background-repeat: no-repeat;
}
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?
Not via the admin interface, I’m afraid. You’d have to code it.
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!
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.
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?
Github always has the latest code for the theme and plugins. Just download them again from their Github pages.
Is there a ‘minifier’ application to generate style-overrides.css from style-overrides.dev.css ?
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`.
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?
It sounds like comments are disabled for that post. You should find an option for that on the post’s edit screen.
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
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.
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
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.
You’re welcome Robbin!
[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
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.
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!
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.