Modifications to FreePress Recent Comments Plugin

Posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006, at 11:10 am, and filed under Meta Category. Note: Hypertext links in the printed form of this document are marked with a superscript "L" plus a number. The number corresponds to the list of web addresses at the bottom of the document.

For others that may find it useful, I’ve made two modifications to the FreePress Recent Coments plugin on DLTJ: one to strip out quoted material when using the Quoter plugin and a second to suppress pingback entries that result from links to material within the blog.

Code from the first came from a blog posting about how to get Quoter to work with a different recent comments plugin. It is slightly modified, though, with the use non-greedy wildcard (*?) in the middle. (It is possible to have more than one quoted section in a comment, and the original code would leave just the text beyond the final [/quote] tag.) The context-sensitive diff is:

*** recentCommentsWidget.php.dist	Wed Aug 23 09:52:11 2006
--- recentCommentsWidget.php	Wed Aug 23 11:22:14 2006
***************
*** 135,140 ****
--- 143,149 ----
  				// Comment Content -&gt; Excerpt
  				$comment_content = strip_tags($comment-&gt;comment_content);
  				$comment_content = stripslashes($comment_content);
+ 				$comment_content = preg_replace('/\[quote(.|\s)*?\[\/quote\]/i', '', $comment_content); // remove quote tags and quoted text
  				$words=split(" ",$comment_content); 
 
  				if($max_letters_per_word!=0) {

The second is a modification to the SQL statement that pulls up records from the wp_comments table. There is an additional AND conditional clause that eliminates the pingback where the URL of the pingback begins with the URL of the blog. The context-sensitive diff:

*** recentCommentsWidget.php.dist	Wed Aug 23 09:52:11 2006
--- recentCommentsWidget.php	Wed Aug 23 11:22:14 2006
***************
*** 221,227 ****
  	if (get_option('WPTagboardPostID')) {
 
  		$request .= "AND ID <> " . get_option('WPTagboardPostID') . " ";
 
  	}
 
! 
 
  	$request .= "AND comment_approved = '1' ORDER BY comment_ID DESC LIMIT $limit";
 
 
  	$comments = $wpdb-&gt;get_results($request);
 
--- 228,235 ----
  	if (get_option('WPTagboardPostID')) {
  		$request .= "AND ID <> " . get_option('WPTagboardPostID') . " ";
  	}
!     // Eliminate pingbacks/tracebacks by registered authors to posts on this blog
! 	$request .= "AND (comment_type = '' OR comment_author_url NOT LIKE \"".get_bloginfo('url')."%\") ";
  	$request .= "AND comment_approved = '1' ORDER BY comment_ID DESC LIMIT $limit";
 
  	$comments = $wpdb-&gt;get_results($request);