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

Re: tracking comments

[denise]

That usually means the browser's prevented the JS from loading -- are you having problems with the javascript site-wide? Check your security settings and make sure you haven't blocked scripting from us.

Re: tracking comments

[cheyinka]

I haven't blocked scripting, and I haven't noticed any other issues - answering a poll still works, for example. The more options link in the tracking popup works, too - it's just that middle-clicking the link doesn't open the more options page in a new tab the way it does in Firefox or the way it used to in Chrome.