Plug It In

A week or so ago the founder of a feminist blog I lurk on asked if anyone could help update their commenting system. It was a real pleasure to realize that hey, this was totally something I could do.

Most of the work I’ve done with wordpress has involved making custom themes, but I figured working with plugins couldn’t be too much harder. I ended up modifying an existing plugin. I made pretty extensive edits, so perhaps I should have started from scratch, but I only really gained the confidence/understanding to make one from scratch through the process of fiddling around with the pre-existing plugin. Catch 22! Where “Catch 22” == “positive learning experience”.

Anyway, here are the modified plugin files. I took “Comment Votes” basic functionality (see here) and made the following changes: - created an administrative panel to view, approve, and delete flagged posts - gave users the ability to provide a reason for why they flagged a post, and administrators the ability to access said reasons through email - prevented negative scores from being displayed and other minor cosmetic changes

If you use it, I’d love to know about it, especially if you find any bugs I need to fix. It retains the GNU General Public License that the original plugin had, so feel free to modify it yourself.