Over the past year, I have developed quite a few sites in WordPress. One of the common requests I have been asked to do is to create a testimonial page, where people can leave their testimonials as a comment and then style the feed so those comments will display nicely as client testimonials.
While this has been easy to do, I have found it rather annoying at times because I have to allow comments on that particular page, but on no others. One would think that WordPress by default would allow for this be be fairly simple out of the box, and it is, but only if you do it their way.
On the WordPress settings, you can choose to disable posts and trackbacks by default, but throughout the entire site. You can still enable comments on a page by page or post by post basis, but you can’t have it be enabled by default on posts, and then disabled by default on pages. This is the problem I always seemed to be running into. Normally, I would just remove the comments template from pages, but once I wanted comments on just one page, I would have to add the code back into the template.
Now, I know I could just grin and bear it and remember to disable comments on each new page, or enable comments on each new post, depending on my main comment settings, but I would prefer one less step to go through each time. I don’t want to have to remember, increasing the possibility of human error.
Last month, I finally determined I have had enough as I put my mind to it and wrote a plugin to allow me to set the default comment settings individually on a page. This way I can enable the comments so they will appear on new posts, but disable them by default on all new pages. I did this using javascript so I can now change my comment settings on an individual post or page basis.
After developing it, I released it to the WordPress community. The plugin is No Page Comment.
Now that a little more than a month has passed since developing it and releasing it to the WordPress community, I have made some more modifications to it. It is now possible to set the default for posts, pages, and any other custom post type that may be installed on your site. I found that some people wanted comments disabled on posts only, but wanted them open by default on pages. Others saw a need to block comments on custom post types that came from third-party plugins. Because of this, I have made the modifications, and am happy to release the next version of No Page Comment. Feel free to check it out. It just may make working with WordPress a little easier for you, as it did for me.
