WordPress 2.7 and Threaded Comments

WordPress 2.7 was announced this week and I’ve been doing upgrades ever since (managing too many blogs!). While there are literally tons of new features in this release, the built-in threaded comments had my attention today.

Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.

(bolding added by moi)

I decided I just had to have some of that comment threading action, so I took a look at the Default theme’s comments.php and compared it to my own theme’s version.

Frankly, mine was pretty ugly so I invented the slacker’s way to upgrade a theme for comment threading.

copy the Default theme’s comment.php to your own theme directory
liberally borrow the Default theme’s comments CSS and past it into your own theme’s stylesheet
(clearly you’ll want to look over your existing stylesheet enough to make sure you’re not clashing/duplicating any classes and such)

After I dropped in the Default’s CSS I just hacked up a few bits and pieces to blend it in and called it good enough.

Oh yeah, I also had to drop into the Settings –> Discussion page and modify some new options there.

If that top box isn’t checked, not much will happen.

Want more details? Check out Otto’s WordPress 2.7 Comments Enhancements article on his blog. Very informative and worth a look if you do a lot of theme work.

For you bloggers, the comment stuff really is just the tip of the iceberg. Check out the announcement post (first link) for the rest of the scoop. For instance, how about this little tid-bit?

Last, but certainly not least, this may be the last time you ever have to manually upgrade WordPress again. We heard how tired you were of doing upgrades for yourself and your friends, so now WordPress includes a built-in upgrade that will automatically notify you of new releases, and when you’re ready it will download them, install them, and upgrade your blog with a single click.

I shiver just reading that…