Brian’s Threaded Comments: Optimized
Douglas KarrThanks for stopping by my personal blog on Marketing Technology! Over 50,000 visitors a month find my content worth returning for, so don't forget to subscribe to the Marketing Technology Blog RSS feed or to the Marketing Technology Email to have new content sent directly to your inbox. You may also find my other business blog helpful, Social Media Domination.
One of the plugins I love to run on my blog is Brian’s Threaded Comments. It allows for communications to be nested, organized and very easy to read and respond to. I’m not sure why the logic hasn’t been pulled into the core of Wordpress, though.
As I viewed the source of my pages, though, the plugin added quite a mess. The plugin inserts both Javascript and styling tags to get it to work. The problem is that inline styling and javascript can increase load times because linked stylesheets and javascript files can be cached once by the browser.
Since search bots index the top ‘x’ amount of a page, code like this pushes the real content down. I’ve not heard of it proved, but I believe this can impact your site’s Search Engine Optimization. The right way to feed a Search Engine is to skip the toppings and provide more meat. I did just that and moved both the Javascript and the CSS to a linked file. I’m running the optimized plugin here.
I’ve written Brian on the optimized plugin, but the email bounced. I also threw him a tip from my blog to see if he’ll stop by. If you’re interested, you can download the optimized plugin here.
I briefly (less than ten minutes) dipped my toe into Intense Debate because easily installed threaded comments appealed.. Much as I love tooling out my site, their system was too much to put up with for this luxury alone.
Something else to improve upon would be having the images local verses having them called from an external location with some sort of encrypted code, at least that’s what it looks like around the lines where it calls the png images.
Thoughts?
Thanks for this…I was about to endeavor to do the exact same thing, you saved me the time.
I had to add a few functions from Brians Threaded Comments 1.5 that were breaking your iteration.
Above
btc_add_reply_id($id):function btc_has_avatars() {
if( function_exists('get_avatar'))
return true;
else if(function_exists('MyAvatars'))
return true;
return false;
}
function btc_avatar() {
if( function_exists('get_avatar')) {
echo get_avatar(get_comment_author_email(), '64');
return;
}
else if(function_exists('MyAvatars')) {
MyAvatars();
return;
}
}
I also added a little CSS from BTC 1.5 to the .css file:
.btc_gravatar {
float: right;
margin: 3px 3px 4px 4px;
}
.collapsed .btc_gravatar { display:none; } /* I added this, since the gravatars weren't collapsing nicely */
It appears now that the version of the plugin that must exist in the plugins folder is the old version. The new version doesn’t seem to render the images right at all.