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

[momijizukamori]

Good to know! If you can do me a huge favor - can you set the journal it's in to use journal-styled comment pages (it's in account settings... um, somewhere) and tell me if it's still an issue there? Trying to figure out if it's a general S2 problem (ie, it affects S2 journal styles as well) or just something specific to the S2 site styles.

[moptothehead]

No worries! Just did so, and it seems to eliminate the problem; the comments are back to links and there's no block of text. The style being used is Flexible Squares.

I can get a screenshot if you'd like.

[momijizukamori]

Oh, hmm. That wouldn't actually check for the bug - Flexible Squares (and all other LJ import layouts) are based on a different core layer than the DW official layouts, including site views. So they don't use the same code. I'll figure out a different way to poke at it *g*

[momijizukamori]

So, congratulations, you found a really weird bug in core2 XD It /does/ seem to be Firefox-specific (possibly only to newer versions, too, but I don't have an easy downgrade method to check), so swapping back to the old comment pages or a browser other than Firefox will get the comments to look fine. Fu and I are digging into the code, so this should be fixed by the next push :)