captsolo weblog

Wrote code to display a box with last commented posts in b2evolution.

Simple, yet useful thing - displays a list of posts that have been commented last. Each post is displayed only once, a number after a post indicates how many comments it currently has.

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To add this feature, you will need to download code of _commentbox.php and place it in the blogs/skins directory.

In the _main.php of your skin (I used fplanque2002) add this code in the location where you want to see the comment box:

require get_path('skins').'/_commentbox.php';

Changes needed to _class_comment.php:

In class member variables list:
var $num_comm;

In the constructor Comment right after comment carma assignment:
$this->num_comm = $db_row['num_comm'];

To the constructor _class_commentlist.php:

In the constructor parameters list add 1 more parameter:

$init_what_to_show = '',
$group_by_post = false )        // group comments by post_ID and count the number of posts in num_comm

"improve" query:

if( $group_by_post )
   $this->request = "SELECT DISTINCT count(*) num_comm, comment_post_ID, max(comment_date) comment_date, ID, post_title ";
else $this->request = "SELECT DISTINCT $tablecomments.* ";

and add grouping instructions BEFORE the ORDER BY instructions:

if( $group_by_post )
   $this->request .= " GROUP BY $tablecomments.comment_post_ID ";

That is it. You may download resulting _class_commentlist.php.

However, there is one known bug I could not fix:

If you enter a blog different from default "All blogs", you may notice that a number of comments has doubled or tripled for some posts.

This happens if a post is filed in more than 1 category in the current blog.

It would be the best to just call some imaginary function get_comment_num() which returns the number of comments this post has. I played with generate_ctp_number(), but it did not work for me. If this is fixed, you would not need to modify _class_comment.php any more.

That'll be good if someone can fix this.