RSS FeedNow With More Confusingly Good Than Ever Before!
Well, the good news is that the commenting system is pretty much done. The bad news is that I lost roughly 13 hours coding it. But I think everyone will enjoy it. Some features:
For those that don't know, Ajax is Asynchronous Javascript and XHTML. It basically means I can change elements on a page without a hard refresh. All of the fading effects and "instant" things on this site use AJAX (well the fading is just JS but what it gets from the DB is AJAX).
If you go to an article and aren't logged in, you can still comment; simply type your login info into the appropriate boxes, fill out the comment, and hit the submit button. You will be logged in and your comment will be added.
Here's how this works: the form can tell, on submit, whether your login is correct, whether you filled out the comment at all, and if you've commented in the last 2 minutes. (Unfortunately, it sort of breaks when a comment is made just before the hour turns. You may have to wait 5 minutes in this case).
When you try to submit, it will give you messages to the right of the comment text area, informing you of what is happening. Up to three messages are displayed at once, and the older messages fade out.
The other admins at the site are probably not too impressed with this anymore (we use it in the add article section), but new users might be interested to know that when you type a comment, it's basically what you see is what you get. A new box will display below the last comment on an article as you type. On submission, this preview fades away and you "real" comment is placed on the page in real time. I think Kotaku has something like this but it never seems to work. And, in case you were wondering, yes you CAN use BBCode in comments. It might not display properly in the live preview, but on submit it works itself out.
I have tested this in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0.0.1. The ONLY error I have encountered (well, after fixing all of the others), is in IE7: if you login and post a comment and try to click post again, it will for some reason break and you will be taken to a blank page. If this happens, simply hit back. This is only after logging in and trying to do a second comment; this will not happen once you log in or go to another page. IE simply doesn't give enough error reporting to figure it out right now.
If you have any other problems, you can let me know in the comments of this page (unless they don't work entirely for some reason, in which case you can reach me at d3vkit [at] gmail [dot] com).
Sorry for the long sort of personal post, but I am very excited to have this done, and done well!
Completely AjaxFor those that don't know, Ajax is Asynchronous Javascript and XHTML. It basically means I can change elements on a page without a hard refresh. All of the fading effects and "instant" things on this site use AJAX (well the fading is just JS but what it gets from the DB is AJAX).
Login and PostIf you go to an article and aren't logged in, you can still comment; simply type your login info into the appropriate boxes, fill out the comment, and hit the submit button. You will be logged in and your comment will be added.
Error Checking, So Much Error Checking!Here's how this works: the form can tell, on submit, whether your login is correct, whether you filled out the comment at all, and if you've commented in the last 2 minutes. (Unfortunately, it sort of breaks when a comment is made just before the hour turns. You may have to wait 5 minutes in this case).
When you try to submit, it will give you messages to the right of the comment text area, informing you of what is happening. Up to three messages are displayed at once, and the older messages fade out.
Last, but not least...Live Preview!The other admins at the site are probably not too impressed with this anymore (we use it in the add article section), but new users might be interested to know that when you type a comment, it's basically what you see is what you get. A new box will display below the last comment on an article as you type. On submission, this preview fades away and you "real" comment is placed on the page in real time. I think Kotaku has something like this but it never seems to work. And, in case you were wondering, yes you CAN use BBCode in comments. It might not display properly in the live preview, but on submit it works itself out.
I have tested this in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0.0.1. The ONLY error I have encountered (well, after fixing all of the others), is in IE7: if you login and post a comment and try to click post again, it will for some reason break and you will be taken to a blank page. If this happens, simply hit back. This is only after logging in and trying to do a second comment; this will not happen once you log in or go to another page. IE simply doesn't give enough error reporting to figure it out right now.
If you have any other problems, you can let me know in the comments of this page (unless they don't work entirely for some reason, in which case you can reach me at d3vkit [at] gmail [dot] com).
Sorry for the long sort of personal post, but I am very excited to have this done, and done well!