Introducing Commentariat & the POI Taskforce Report
I’ve written before about the perennial problem of publishing documents online for comment. The solutions either seem to be clunky, laborious to setup or use, or problematically inaccessible to users without Javascript.
The problem remains, but there’s an extra option now, in the shape of Commentariat, a customised WordPress theme we’ve developed at DIUS and been using for a couple of months now on an internal project and which we’re making freely available for anyone to use and adapt. I’ve also been helping the Power of Information Taskforce to implement it as part of the publication of their new Report.
What’s it do? Rather than make every single paragraph commentable as CommentPress (sadly still offline) does, Commentariat is about meaningful chunks and sections.
- You define a commentable chunk within a section (in WordPress terms, a post within a category)
- Chunks within a section have ‘Next’ and ‘Previous’ buttons linking them together, plus a drop down menu at the top powered by the Drop Down Post List plugin, to make it easy to get between pages
- The comment form is to the side, rather than at the bottom, and floats (in modern browsers) so it’s easily accessible at all times. Comments are listed at the bottom in the conventional way
- The footer contains RSS feeds for comments on the chunk itself, all comments and all chunk content, making it easier for readers to keep track of the discussion or even grab chunks of the document to mashup in new ways. I’d recommend the excellent Subscribe to Comments plugin so commenters can get email alerts of new comments added to the thread
- There’s a print stylesheet to make the content print in a plain, simple way; and for geek appeal, it seems to work more or less OK on an iPhone
I think this is a small step forward from CommentPress and CoComment in terms of accessibility, Javascript independence and browser compatibility. It’s also marginally less laborious and slightly more purpose-built than the approach Ofcom took to their commentable consultations. And hopefully its muted style is slightly more pleasing to aesthetes than tools like CommentOnThis. WordPress gurus will spot plenty of holes – not least the rather squiffy way RSS is used to display post comments – as always, I’m grateful for ideas and feedback.
Want to read more of my stuff like this?
29 Responses to “Introducing Commentariat & the POI Taskforce Report”
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This is great Steph, looks really good and thanks for making it freely available – will be downloading and playing straight away!
[...] Steph has posted about the work he has been doing getting the Power of Information Taskforce report online for interested folk to comment on it before it gets published. It’s a lovely piece of work: [...]
This is a great piece of work, Steph. I’ve just been through the document, every single chunk, and commented liberally… and that’s the first time I’ve ever done that. Which says something in itself.
Of course, I’m chuffed to see it done in WordPress again. It just underlines why I’m so evangelical about the product: it’s the fact that it lets people like you do stuff like that.
It’d be great to see the theme offered ‘properly’ on wordpress.org – and for you, and HM Government, to take credit for it. Practising what we’re preaching… who’d have thought it?
[...] UPDATE: 1 Feb ‘09: I’ve added a sixth way – using a customised WordPress theme – described over here. [...]
Steph – this is amazingly useable, and better suited for our needs than CommentPress. I am working my way through the report this morning.
This is lovely – as you say, a real step forward from the Ofcom hosted Typepad approach. Great work.
Now, all that needs to happen is for wordpress to offer a decent customisable hosting service for £10 a month…
I never got chance to say thank you Steph. So, thank you now. Great piece of work.
[...] it comes to consultation for example, tools like Commentariat are making this possible and the plain english Big City Plan Talk show that there is another way, [...]
[...] You can read more about Commentariat theme (which has been released as an open theme by it’s DIUS developers
on @lesteph’s blog: Introducing Commentariat & the POI Taskforce Report. [...]
Nice job Steph.
We liked CommentPress idea so much we built (nearly complete) a .NET version CommentPress, pluggable to most .NET CMS (drag and drop). Nearly RTM, currently testing with 10,000+ pages on 10 sites running from single db.
Definite thanks from here too. I’d like more navigation at the bottom of pages as I tend to scroll right down and read others comments and then leave my own then want to move on to next section.
@Seb: it’s a good point. I’ll add some discreet footer links into the template for version 1.3…
Ooh, I take my comment about easy, cheap hosted wordpress for dumbos back…
http://www.dreamhost.com/wordpress.html
@Tom L: Oooh, good spot. I do rather like Dreamhost (the people who host this blog) even if they’re a shady, too-good-to-be-true Californian outfit. Reliability isn’t bad, control panel is the best I’ve used and customer support is friendly, effective and helpful.
I love the theme and would like to use it for a document we have – is the theme 2.6 compatible? Unfortunately I can’t get 2.7 to install through our IT admin at the moment but can get 2.6. I’ve had a quick look at Commentariat on 2.6 but the comment form does no appear – can’t see an obvious reason why and wonder if this is a symptom of it not being 2.6 compatible.
@Jon:
It wasn’t, but now it is
Grab the version 1.2 code from http://sandbox.dius.gov.uk/code and let me know how you get on.
Hi there Steph.
http://www.engsc.ac.uk/teaching-guides/education-theories/
Thanks very much for making it compatible with 2.6. Appears to work a treat. In beta for us too – we will be promoting it after final tweaks and when the hard copy is published.
Thanks again!
Jon
Great development, for which many thanks. However, I can’t get the theme to work with WP 2.7.1. Is this an incompatibility or (always likely) “user error”?
Thanks.
@Gardner: should work with 2.7 and 2.7.1 (I’ve used both with the theme recently). By all means send me a URL to take a look at via the contact form on this site.
@Steph: I’m clearly doing something wrong on my end. I keep getting this error when I click either on a chunk comment link or on a “read more” link:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function ddpl_list() in /home1/gardnerc/public_html/texasfdn/wp-content/themes/commentariat/index.php on line 20
Ah, got it together now. At last. Not sure what I was doing wrong, but oh well: onward and upward. This is a very nice piece of work, Steph! Elegant and extremely useful. Many thanks.
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Anyone had a go at using this with WP 2.8 ..?
Yep, works fine with 2.8 – see our example today: http://interactive.bis.gov.uk/advancedmanufacturing/ which is on WP 2.8.1
[...] but in the meantime, Steph Gray pointed out a few of the original Commentariat features in Introducing Commentariat & the POI Taskforce Report. If reading that post is still too much effort, the major difference to users is that CommentPress [...]
Has anyone upgraded a site from CommentPress to Commentariat? Anything to look out for?
Jon
They’re quite different beasts really – in fact the most recently CommentPress release comes as a plugin rather than a theme.
If you want detailed feedback on a document, I’d suggest CommentPress. If you need flexibility/simplicity and only have a short and fairly simple document you want discussion around, try Commentariat.
But in answer to your question, no, I’ve not tried
We’re trialling this in New Zealand Steph for a Ministry of Education guide and it works a treat. Running on 2.8.4 under a Mu/BuddyPress installation.
That’s ace – nice one Chris! Hope you get a good response.