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.

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