The Reader Appreciation Project

Andrew Rickmann, friend and fellow RA Project contributor, has released a new plugin called Fun With In-Context Comments for WordPress 2.5.

The plugin allows you to add questions to your comment section, which readers can optionally answer.

Applications

The applications for such a plugin are enormous. If you’re running a political blog, you can ask questions on current issues.

If you’re running a celebrity blog, you can ask questions based on a certain celebrity.

And, most importantly, if you are writing a support-type post, you can ask users for their browser, operating system, and whatever else you can possibly think of.

Brief Overview of Features

When you head into the WordPress 2.5 Comments panel, you’ll see an option for “Global Contexts”. From there, you can specify a number of options. You can also add questions, which you can then optionally add on any post or page with comments enabled.

Global Contexts – Adding a Question

The neat thing about this plugin is you can also add questions from a post, which will only apply for the post in question. This makes the plugin both flexible, and completely post independent.

Post Contexts – Choosing or Adding a Question

From a commenter’s point of view, you are presented an optional question when leaving a comment, which will then show up in the comment.

Leaving a Comment

And the final feature I’ll mention: It’s fully compatible with the latest version of Ajax Edit Comments.

Compatible with AEC 2.1

Future Versions

Andrew mentioned to me that he’s planning on adding a feature to tally how many people have answered a question in a particular manner, which is very similar to a poll.

Conclusion

Fun With In-Context Comments is a nice way to unobtrusively ask readers a question, which will hopefully put a reader’s comment in the context of a post.

The plugin will help with support issues, and will also assist readers when filtering comments based on a particular answer.

As a sidenote, Andrew’s plugin is also part of the WeblogToolsCollection plugin competition. If you have a moment, please check out his plugin over there and give him some feedback.

I also have the plugin installed here if you’d like to try it out on this post.

For those who have been following me on Twitter, you know I’ve been working on the next version of Ajax Edit Comments.

My goal with Ajax Edit Comments 2.0 is to provide a comment-editing interface independent of themes, and allow blog administrators extreme flexibility when editing comments on a post or in the admin panel.

I have yet to complete the main editing interface, but I have created the foundational code and editing options. The icons are courtesy of Pro Theme Design.

Here’s a brief preview of what I’ve accomplished so far:

Administrators will be able to delete, mark as spam, edit, and unapprove (moderate) comments from a post.

Administrators can edit, mark for moderation, or recover from spam in the Akismet panel.

There is only one admin panel in the new version, which has been a heavily requested feature. This will give you an idea of what new features are coming.

As the plugin nears completion, I’ll start releasing private betas and release candidates. If you’re interested in helping test this out, please leave a comment below. More than likely the new version will be WordPress 2.5x only.

To help out the readers on this site who use the “@” symbol in their name when leaving comments, I’ve decided to experiment with a new WordPress plugin called KeywordLuv.

What it does is translates a comment like this:

Sue@TameBay

Into this:

Sue from TameBay

I pick on Sue simply because she leaves comments like that (nothing wrong with it in my opinion).

Theoretically, the plugin applies the correct weight to the keywords after the “@” symbol.

When the plugin is deactivated, everything is converted back to its “name@site” format.

There is a issue with Ajax Edit Comments, but only when editing the name portion, which hardly anybody does anyway.

Feel free to leave a comment below to try it. I’ll leave it installed for a week and see how it works out for you all.