Support #12550
closed
Deprecate CommentPress Core?
Added by scott voth about 4 years ago.
Updated about 4 years ago.
Category name:
WordPress Plugins
Description
We had an issue on ZenDesk with Catherine Engh who was trying to use CommentPress. It seems that the plugin/theme combo is not really intended to run on a multi-site environment and acts very funky. In particular, the Special Pages section links go to inappropriate places, the footer is screwed up, and if you switch from an existing site to CommentPress, it is quite a mess. You can comment on posts (with difficulty), but not on pages.
I would vote to deprecate.
- Status changed from New to Assigned
- Assignee set to Boone Gorges
Boone, can you please test?
- Status changed from Assigned to Reporter Feedback
I can confirm that the footer is weird.
The Special Pages links seem to work OK in my testing, though it might be somewhat confusing that 'Site Home Page' leads to the Commons home page, while 'Title Page' leads to the root of the current blog. Were there other aspects of Special Pages that seemed bad?
Commenting in general seems fine to me - you mentioned that there was some difficulty there, perhaps you could provide more context?
Looking over the documentation, it appears that CommentPress is shipped with three themes of its own. Presumably, these themes are maintained - the existing CommentPress theme on the Commons hasn't been updated by the author in many years. Should we be installing one or more of these themes? Scott, do you have experience with them? Could you experiment in order to give advice?
I'm happy to deprecate the existing theme but I want to be sure we're offering a CP-compatible theme.
It definitely works better if you create a new site and use the plugin. I notice the special pages "Create a New Document" goes to Create a new site. When I was working with Catherine Engh, who switched to CP from an existing class site, I noticed more issues with the Special Pages - seeing sitewide comments, and inappropriate links (Site Home Page goes to Commons homepage), and site opening to an unknown page, and the inability to comment on pages - post commenting works fine.
But just now, I switched from an existing site to CP, and it didn't totally suck. Page commenting works, but Site Home Page goes still goes to Commons homepage, and Create a New Document is still broken. And footer is screwed up.
I'm fine with not deprecating it, but it does seem a little disappointing. I suggested that Catherine use Hypothesis instead.
Just FYI, Christian Wach is the lead developer of CommentPress. it's possible he could address some of these issues
- Status changed from Reporter Feedback to Staged for Production Release
- Target version set to 1.16.8
Hypothesis is nice but serves a somewhat different purpose. I think it's still worthwhile to offer CommentPress if we can get it working sufficiently well.
I wonder how many of our problems might be solved simply by offering the updated theme. In https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/2b12c8d716c13f115c550803e659663f60517ac3 I've added this theme to the repo, and it will be available after the next release. The old Commentpress theme is already disabled across the network.
Scott, after the release, maybe you could activate the newer theme on a test site to see whether the more significant problems have gone away, at least enough to make the tool usable. If there are a few minor things - the appearance of the sitewide footer, or perhaps one or two broken Special Pages things - they may be easy enough to fix that it's worth the effort.
- Status changed from Staged for Production Release to Resolved
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