1Jetpack-style comments without Jetpack

One of the best things about word­press is the built-in social aspect provided by com­ments.  Get­ting your com­ment sec­tion right can be very import­ant to any web­site, includ­ing ours.  Over the years we’ve exper­i­mented with vari­ous com­ment plu­gins includ­ing Dis­qus and more recently Jet­pack.  How­ever, we’ve always ended up bring things back in house for man­age­ment, per­form­ance and pri­vacy reas­ons.  When I moved back from Jet­pack com­ments I really missed some of the slick fea­tures provided by Jet­pack, both the social-net­work logins and the gen­er­al slick styl­ing.  Any­way, to cut a long story short I finally had time today to take a good look at how word­press “does” com­ments and fig­ure out a way to build an in-house sys­tem which looks nice and slick like the com­ment inter­face provided by jet­pack.  Best of all its sur­pris­ingly simple and does things the “prop­er” way…

First — to deal with the “social” aspect, I’ve resor­ted to a plu­gin called Word­Press Social Login by Miled.  There are sev­er­al “social login” plu­gins, but this ver­sion (unlike the oth­ers) keeps everything totally in-house.  It is a bit more work to con­fig­ure, but for the bene­fit to our vis­it­ors pri­vacy alone this is well worth it.

Next up was fig­ur­ing out how to change the built-in word­press com­ment form func­tion (fun­nily enough called comment_form()).  I’ll provide more detail later if any­one requests it, for now just find the rel­ev­ant code below…

comments.php (in theme folder)

[php]
<!– You can start edit­ing here. –>

<?php if ( comments_open() ) : ?>

<sec­tion id=“respond” class=“respond-form”>
<?php comment_form(); ?>

<script>
document.getElementById(‘hidden-form-area’).style.display = ‘none’;
func­tion myFunction()
{
document.getElementById(‘hidden-form-area’).style.display = ‘block’;
}
</script>

</section>

<?php endif; // if you delete this the sky will fall on your head ?>
[/php]

functions.php (in theme folder)

[php]
func­tion my_fields($fields)
{
$fields[‘author’] = ‘<p class=“comment-form-author”><input type=“text” name=“author” id=“author” size=“22” tabindex=“1” placeholder=“Name (required)” /></p>’;
$fields[’email’] = ‘<p class=“comment-form-email”><input type=“text” name=“email” id=“email” size=“22” tabindex=“2” placeholder=“E‑mail (required — nev­er shared with any­one)” /></p>’;
$fields[‘url’] = ‘<p class=“comment-form-url”><input type=“text” name=“url” id=“url” size=“22” tabindex=“2” placeholder=“Website” /></p>’;
return $fields;
}
add_filter(‘comment_form_default_fields’,‘my_fields’);

func­tion remove_notice($defaults)
{
$defaults[‘comment_notes_before’] = ”;
$defaults[‘comment_notes_after’] = ”;
return $defaults;
}
add_filter( ‘comment_form_defaults’, ‘remove_notice’ );

func­tion remove_textarea($defaults)
{
$defaults[‘comment_field’] = ”;
return $defaults;
}
add_filter( ‘comment_form_defaults’, ‘remove_textarea’ );

func­tion add_textarea()
{
echo ‘<p class=“comment-form-comment”><textarea id=“comment” name=“comment” placeholder=“Enter your com­ment here…” onfocus=“myFunction()”></textarea></p><div id=“hidden-form-area”>’;
}
add_action( ‘comment_form_top’, ‘add_textarea’, 1 );

func­tion add_hideend()
{
echo ‘</div>’;
}
add_action( ‘comment_form_after’, ‘add_hideend’ );
[/php]