ikiwiki/ todo/ supporting comments via disussion pages

I would love to see more traditional support for comments in ikiwiki. One way would be to structure data on the discussion page in such a way that a "comment" plugin could parse it and yet the discussion page would still be a valid and usable wiki page.

For example if the discussion page looked like this:

# Subject of First Comment
Posted by [Adam Shand](http://adam.shand.net/) at 10:34PM on 14/04/2007

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Morbi consectetuer nunc quis 
magna.  Etiam non est eget sapien vulputate varius. Vivamus magna. Sed justo. Donec 
pellentesque ultrices urna.

# Subject of the Second Comment
Posted by [Foo Bar](http://foobar.net/) at 11:41PM on 14/04/2007

Quisque lacinia, lorem eget ornare facilisis, enim eros iaculis felis, id volutpat nibh
mauris ut felis. Vestibulum risus nibh, adipiscing volutpat, volutpat et, lacinia ut, 
pede. Maecenas dolor. Vivamus feugiat volutpat ligula.

Each header marks the start of a new comment and the line immediately following is the comments meta data (author, email/url, datestamp). Hopefully you could structure it in such a way that the scope

This would allow:

Is this simple enough to be sensible?

-- AdamShand

Well, if it's going to look like a blog, why not store the data the same way ikiwiki stores blogs, with a separate page per comment? As already suggested in discussion page as blog though there are some things to be worked out also discussed there. --Joey

I certainly won't be fussy about how it gets implemented, I was just trying to think of the lightest weight most "wiki" solution. :-) -- Adam.

As a side note, the feature described above (having a form not to add a page but to expand it in a formated way) would be useful for other things when the content is short (timetracking, sub-todo list items, etc..) --hb

MarceloMagallon's implementation

I've been looking into this. I'd like to implement a "blogcomments" plugin. Looking at the code, I think the way to go is to have a formbuilder_setup hook that uses a different template instead of the standard editpage one. That template would not display the editcontent field. The problem that I'm running into is that I need to append the new content to the old one.

-- MarceloMagallon

Anything I can do to help? --Joey

Figured it out. Can you comment on the code below? Thanks. -- MarceloMagallon

So, I have some code, included below. For some reason that I don't quite get it's not updating the wiki page after a submit. Maybe it's something silly on my side...

What I ended up doing is write something like this to the page:

[[!blogcomment  from="""Username""" timestamp="""12345""" subject="""Some text""" text="""the text of the comment"""]]

Each comment is processed to something like this:

<div>
    <dl>
        <dt>From</dt><dd>Username</dd>
        <dt>Date</dt><dd>Date (needs fixing)</dd>
        <dt>Subject</dt><dd>Subject text</dd>
    </dl>

    <p>Text of the comment...</p>
</div>

. In this way the comments can be styled using CSS.

-- MarceloMagallon

Code

#!/usr/bin/perl
package IkiWiki::Plugin::comments;

use warnings;
use strict;
use IkiWiki '1.02';

sub import {
    hook(type => "formbuilder_setup", id => "comments",
        call => \&formbuilder_setup);
    hook(type => "preprocess", id => "blogcomment",
        call => \&preprocess);  
}

sub formbuilder_setup (@) {
    my %params=@_;
    my $cgi = $params{cgi};
    my $form = $params{form};   
    my $session = $params{session};

    my ($page)=$form->field('page');
    $page=IkiWiki::titlepage(IkiWiki::possibly_foolish_untaint($page));

    # XXX: This needs something to make it blog specific
    unless ($page =~ m{/discussion$} &&
            $cgi->param('do') eq 'edit' &&
            ! exists $form->{title})
    {
        return;
    }

    if (! $form->submitted)
    {
        $form->template(IkiWiki::template_file("makeblogcomment.tmpl"));
        $form->field(name => "blogcomment", type => "textarea", rows => 20,
            cols => 80);
        return;
    }

    my $content="";
    if (exists $pagesources{$page}) {
        $content=readfile(srcfile($pagesources{$page}));
        $content.="\n\n";
    }
    my $name=defined $session->param('name') ?
        $session->param('name') : gettext('Anonymous');
    my $timestamp=time;
    my $subject=defined $cgi->param('comments') ?
        $cgi->param('comments') : '';
    my $comment=$cgi->param('blogcomment');

    $content.=qq{[[!blogcomment  from="""$name""" timestamp="""$timestamp""" subject="""$subject""" text="""$comment"""]]\n\n};
    $content=~s/\n/\r\n/g;
    $form->field(name => "editcontent", value => $content, force => 1);
}

sub preprocess (@) {
    my %params=@_;

    my ($text, $date, $from, $subject, $r);

    $text=IkiWiki::preprocess($params{page}, $params{destpage},
            IkiWiki::filter($params{page}, $params{text}));
    $from=exists $params{from} ? $params{from} : gettext("Anonymous");
    $date=localtime($params{timestamp}) if exists $params{timestamp};
    $subject=$params{subject} if exists $params{subject};

    $r = qq{<div class="blogcomment"><dl>\n};
    $r .= '<dt>' . gettext("From") . "</dt><dd>$from</dd>\n" if defined $from;
    $r .= '<dt>' . gettext("Date") . "</dt><dd>$date</dd>\n" if defined $date;
    $r .= '<dt>' . gettext("Subject") . "</dt><dd>$subject</dd>\n"
        if defined $subject;
    $r .= "</dl>\n" . $text . "</div>\n";

    return $r;
}

1;

smcv's implementation

I've started a smcvpostcomment plugin (to be renamed to postcomment if people like it, but I'm namespacing it while it's still experimental) which I think more closely resembles what Joey was after. The code is cargo-culted from a mixture of editpage and inline's "make a blog post" support - it has to use a lot of semi-internal IkiWiki:: functions (both of those plugins do too). It doesn't fully work yet, but I'll try to get it into a state where it basically works and can be published in the next week or two.

My approach is:

I've also updated Marcelo's code (above) to current ikiwiki, and moved it to a "marceloblogcomment" namespace - it's in the "marcelocomments" branch of my repository (see http://git.debian.org/?p=users/smcv/ikiwiki.git;a=log;h=refs/heads/marcelocomments). I had to reconstitute the .tmpl file, which Marcelo didn't post here.

--smcv

OK, the postcomment branch in my repository contains an implementation. What do you think so far? Known issues include:

--smcv

I've updated smcvpostcomment and publicised it as ?comments. --smcv

While there is still room for improvement and entirely other approaches, I am calling this done since smcv's comments plugin is ready. --Joey