Styling Comments by Author

Posted by Edward Caissie on May 26, 2009 in WordPress |

As I was working through the various files involved in my WordPress Desk Mess Mirrored theme I discovered I did not like the original comment author CSS class assignment code.

The original code was as follows:

<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>
  <div class="<?php if ($comment->comment_author_email == "xxx@yyy.com") echo 'administrator'; else echo $oddcomment; ?> item" id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">

It did not thrill me with the choice of using the author’s email address. As far as I see it this could possibly lead to misrepresented comments or replies, if the blog owner was not careful with their contact information and their comment moderation settings.

I started with the idea that there must be a way to check the comment author and compare to the registered users list of the blog. This started my searches and brought me to this codex article: http://codex.wordpress.org/User:Jalenack/Comment_Loop_Beauty with the following code reference:

<cite<?php if ($comment->user_id == '1') echo ' class="admin"'; ?>>
  <?php comment_author() ?>
</cite>

Which I expanded upon to this:

<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>
  <div class="<?php if ($comment->user_id == '1') echo 'administrator';
    /* elseif ($comment->user_id == '2') echo 'administrator'; */
    /* add additional user_id following above example, echo the 'CSS element' you want to use for styling */
    ...
    <?php endif; ?>

This snippet of code writes the class administrator for the user_id #1 (generally the blog owner) and can then be further modified for each user_id as appropriate, changing the class or not as the design requires.

To find an individual user_id, go to your blog’s Dashboard; under Users, click on Authors & Users. Click on the Username (to edit); now in the address bar you will see a URL address starting with: http://your_blog_url/wp-admin/user-edit.php?user_id=x… , where x (a number) is the user_id for that particular Username.

... other posts by Edward Caissie

Tags: style

4 Comments

Chip Bennett says:

June 6, 2009 at 12:39 pm

I use another method, that also does not expose the author’s email address:

(wrapped in php tags, of course):

$isByAuthor = false;
if($comment->user_id == $post->post_author) {
$isByAuthor = true;
}

Then, inside the comment LI:

if($isByAuthor ) { echo ‘class=”authorcomment”‘;}

Then, of course, the style sheet will define li.authorcomment.

I think it might be a bit cleaner, and isn’t dependent upon knowing the author/admin UserID.

(I’m sure I picked up this method from someone/somewhere (perhaps the Codex; perhaps not). I’d give credit, but I don’t remember anymore…)

» Reply to this Comment «
- JellyBeen says:
  
  June 6, 2009 at 2:31 pm
  
  That’s a great little snippet to keep in mind Chip, thanks for sharing it here.
  
  I am using this method here to differentiate between two, or more, registered members of the blog, giving each registered member (and for that matter it can be extended to non-registered members) a unique style for their comments. For example this reply.
  
  » Reply to this Comment «
Chip Bennett says:

June 6, 2009 at 5:04 pm

You could also do something like:

li class=”user-PHPSTUFFHERE”

where PHPSTUFFHERE =

php echo $comment->user_id;

So UserID 1 would have:

li class=”user-1″

And UserID 15 would have:

li class=”user-15″

You could also wrap an if statement around the user-id call, and differentiate between registered commenters and non-registered commenters; something like (this may not be *exactly* right, since i don’t know what gets returned for an anonymous comment):

li class=”PHPSTUFF”

where PHPSTUFF =

if $comment->user_id {
$user_status = registered_user;
echo $user_status. ” user-”.$comment->user_id;
} else {
$user_status = non_registered_user;
echo $user_status;
} endif;

(Feel free to correct if my PHP syntax is wrong there.)

That way, for a non-registered user, you would get:

li class=”non_registered_user”

And for a registered user with user_id 5, you would get:

li class=”registered_user user-5″

That way, you could style the comments differently for registered and anonymous users, and also for each user ID.

(Nice post; thanks for the food for thought! I might try something like this on my own blog.)

» Reply to this Comment «
Edward Caissie says:

June 6, 2009 at 8:11 pm

I do enjoy your comments. They make for interesting reading and great for new ideas. I believe your latest comment would lead to a more automated styling approach whereas my original post is very much a manual approach. FYI, user_id=0 identifies non-registered users.

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