Comments on: Styling Comments by Author

By: Edward Caissie

Edward Caissie — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 00:11:59 +0000

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.

By: Chip Bennett

Chip Bennett — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 21:04:47 +0000

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.)

By: JellyBeen

JellyBeen — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 18:31:40 +0000

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.

By: Chip Bennett

Chip Bennett — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:39:14 +0000

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…)