Idno was primarily built around the idea of distributed commenting, that is, when replying to a post written on someone else’s blog you’d actually write your reply on your own site, and then send a webmention.

This works well, but since many people are still trapped in legacy silo platforms like Facebook or Google+, it’d be nice if they could have a way to join in the discussion. So, I put together a quick plugin which provides traditional commenting functionality.

This plugin, once installed and activated, will provide comments for logged in and logged out users. At the moment it’s pretty basic, but hopefully I’ll add spam filtering, moderation and gravatar support soon.

» Visit the project on Github…

Over on github, I’ve just pushed a little tool which I use during the development of Elgg sites and find very handy.

The tool does nothing more than append some environment information – logged in user, page owner, session etc – to the page shell in a HTML comment block. This information can be invaluable when trying to debug an Elgg site, and because the plugin renders this in a very light weight way, it shouldn’t interfere with anything else your site has got going on.

As usual, code on github…

» Visit the project on Github…

The default behaviour of comments in an Elgg system is similar to that of standard blogging software, in that comment notifications only go to the post’s original author.

So, if Alice uploads a file and Bob comments on it, Alice would receive a notification. If Charlie comments on it as well, only Alice would receive the notification. In a modern social network, this artificially stifles conversation.

So, I wrote a very quick plugin which modifies the default notification behaviour slightly…

Now, with this plugin activated, if Charlie leaves a comment, both Alice and Bob will receive a notification.

Simple, but quite handy.

» Visit the project on Github…