Nick's Hotaru CMS Blog

It's been a busy couple of days here. After finishing the User and Post Manager plugins, I wanted to work on a Comment Manager. I quickly realized that I was missing a comment_status field in the Comments database table, so spent a good while adding that, and allowing users with given permissions to delete a comment or send it to moderation directly from the comments themselves. This led to various issues with child comments that no longer had a visible parent... and that was just the start!

Eventually, I finished version 1 of the Comment Manager. I'm pretty pleased with it, especially because it lists most recently pending posts, i.e. your spam queue, by default. Clicking on a comment will open it up in a textbox for editing, or you can just approve or delete it. There are also links to mass-approve or mass-delete 'pending' comments.

After all that was done, I decided a spam queue isn't much fun without some spam, so I put together an Akismet plugin that should work with both comments and posts. I say "should" because its hard to test Akismet. It seems to approve all my comments and posts, but then I haven't submitted anything likely to fail yet. What I have done, however, is include the ability to train the Akismet server by reporting false positives. It would be interesting to see how effectively 50 Hotaru sites could train Akismet!

There are a few things I still want to add to the Comments and Comment Manager plugins, but I might just save them till later and try to push these out to the trunk and zip them up for download. I'll see if I can get that done tomorrow, but it might be the weekend before you can play with them.