Comment Pages in S2: the old becomes new

[fu]

One of our long-running projects is to remove the old crufty code written in BML (our old templating system) and replace it with better alternatives throughout the site. And the coding for talkread.bml -- which is what is used any time you load up a site-skinned comment page -- is a particularly painful example.

Add to that, having the site-skinned comment pages be written one way, and custom comment pages another, makes it likely for one to lag behind the other. For example: site-skinned comment pages show the link for entries with screened comments as: "x visible | y screened". But S2 comment pages didn't have that information until this code push!

So I'm really happy to say that we have a new version of the comments page which uses pure S2, so now site-skinned comment pages and journal-styled comment pages are formed the same way on the backend even if they don't look the same. exor674 worked hard on the backend to make this possible, then momijizukamori came through with some spit and polish (with some help from kunzite).

The idea is for the new version to look as much as possible like the old version, though there might be a few discrepancies, because the backend is so different. momijizukamori has done her best to mimic the look and feel of the old comment pages. But the comments page is one of the most used pages here, so we'd like you all to come and give it a good shakedown.

Turn on beta testing for the "New S2 Comment Pages" -- and let us know in comments if you find anything out of the ordinary.

List of known issues.

Comments

[asklepios]

+1 to this entire comment - the extra link doesn't actually serve any purpose except to put something in the way where I might accidentally click on it while trying to do something else to the comment. There are already two clearly marked ways of linking to the comment there, I'm not sure why anyone would want a third that doesn't add anything useful?

[momijizukamori]

In most S2 styles, they were being used to build the page summary - which isn't a part of this style, and the 'thread' link only appears if a comment has replies. But subject lines are now unlinked, leaving just the small one in the header :)