[wp-hackers] Comment Abstraction

[David Chait]

+1.

would also make it possible to replace comments with say forum posts, 
transparent under the hood without changing a line of template/theme code.

-d
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Owen Winkler" <ringmaster at midnightcircus.com>
To: <wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com>
Sent: Friday, January 13, 2006 8:48 AM
Subject: [wp-hackers] Comment Abstraction


| While working on a project recently, I noticed that although there are
| many functions for abstracting post fetching from queries, there are
| none for doing this with comments.
|
| For example, functions like get_posts() let you fetch a set of posts.
| An entire class, WP_Query, has features for retrieving posts without a
| developer having to write any SQL.  And in among those functions and
| classes there are a dozen plugin hooks for altering what they return.
|
| Conversely, comment retrieval is primarily accomplished using SQL
| queries.  As such, hooks for modifying what they return would need to be
| inserted wherever a query was executed.
|
| The method for retrieving comments using a template's comments.php is
| not so transparent, either.  A variable, $comments, simply shows up out
| of seemingly nowhere to provide the comments for a post.
|
| My suggestion as a core enhancement for 2.next is to provide abstraction
| functions and a first-pass set of plugin hooks to filter comments.
|
| Anyone else have opinions on this?
|
| Owen
|