John Dyer

There are some great changes coming for BlogEngine.NET 1.5.0.0, and one of them is nested comments! I checked in the changes to Codeplex just last night, and I’ve implemented them here as a demo while we hammer out the final details.

Nested (or threaded) comments have been added to a lot of blog platforms lately (including WordPress 2.7), and it is a major feature of comment plugins like Disqus and Intense Debate. I personally think threaded comments make longer posts with lots of comments make a lot more sense.

Here’s an example of how a the comments in a recent post of mine make a lot more sense after turning on nesting. Since I responded in bursts to comments, they were out of order, but with nesting you can see that my comment (in dark brown) are now contextually nested and make much more sense. (Note: To make this work, I had to go back and manually add the “parentid” attribute to my comments to make them nested.)

Before (not nested)	After (nested)

If you want to try it out, you can try it on this post or download the latest check-in from Codeplex. Just be warned that this isn’t the final release. There may be some quirks in the JavaScript.

To add nesting to your existing themes, you’ll need to add the following code (marked by HTML comments) from the Standard Theme:

<div id="id_<%=Comment.Id %>" class="vcard comment<%= Post.Author.Equals(Comment.Author, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) ? " self" : "" %>">  
  <p class="date"><%= Comment.DateCreated %> <a href="#id_<%=Comment.Id %>">#</a></p>
  <p class="gravatar"><%= Gravatar(80)%></p>  
  <p class="content"><%= Text %></p>  
  <p class="author">
    <%= Comment.Website != null ? "<a href=\"" + Comment.Website + "\" class=\"url fn\">" + Comment.Author + "</a>" : "<span class=\"fn\">" +Comment.Author + "</span>" %>
    <%= Flag %>
    <%= ((BlogEngine.Core.BlogSettings.Instance.IsCommentNestingEnabled && Comment.IsApproved) ? " | " : "") %>
    <%= ReplyToLink %> <!—- add this for reply to links –>
    <%= AdminLinks %>
  </p>
</div>
<!—- Start: threading –>
<div class="comment-replies" id="replies_<%=Comment.Id %>" <%= (Comment.Comments.Count == 0) ? " style=\"display:none;\"" : "" %>>
  <asp:PlaceHolder ID="phSubComments" runat="server" />
</div>
<!—- End: threading –>

Hope you like it, and let me know if you implement it on your site!