doc/plugins/comments.mdwn



[[!template id=plugin name=comments author="[[Simon_McVittie|smcv]]"]]
[[!tag type/useful]]
This plugin adds "blog-style" comments. Unlike the wiki-style freeform
Discussion pages, these comments are posted by a simple form, cannot later
be edited, and rss/atom feeds are provided of each page's comments.
When using this plugin, you should also enable [[htmlscrubber]] and either
[[htmltidy]] or [[htmlbalance]]. Directives are filtered out by default, to
avoid commenters slowing down the wiki by causing time-consuming
processing. As long as the recommended plugins are enabled, comment
authorship should hopefully be unforgeable by CGI users.
The intention is that on a non-wiki site (like a blog) you can lock all
pages for admin-only access, then allow otherwise unprivileged (or perhaps
even anonymous) users to comment on posts. See the documentation of the
[[lockedit]] and [[anonok]] pages for details on locking down a wiki so
users can only post comments.
Individual comments are stored as internal-use pages named something like
page/comment_1, page/comment_2, etc. These pages internally use a
\[[!_comment]] [[ikiwiki/directive]].
There are some global options for the setup file:

comments_pagespec: [[ikiwiki/PageSpec]] of pages where comments are
allowed. The default is not to allow comments on any pages. To allow
comments to all posts to a blog, you could use
blog/posts/* and !*/Discussion.
comments_closed_pagespec: [[ikiwiki/PageSpec]] of pages where
posting of new comments is closed, but any existing comments will still
be displayed. Often you will list a set of individual pages here.
For example: blog/controversial or blog/flamewar
comments_pagename: if this is e.g. comment_ (the default), then
comment pages will be named something like page/comment_12
comments_allowdirectives: if true (default false), comments may
contain IkiWiki [[directives|ikiwiki/directive]]
comments_commit: if true (default true), comments will be committed to
the version control system
comments_allowauthor: if true (default false), anonymous commenters may
specify a name for themselves, and the [[!meta author]] and
[[!meta authorurl]] directives will not be overridden by the comments
plugin