OK, I think I’ve got a cut for the next release of Lorelle’s requested plugin. However, I have not had a chance to test this outside of my own system (where it seems to work fine), and so I would love to have any volunteers help check this out on different installations for anything I’ve overlooked.

The basic mechanics are as follows: I coded up a new link “Reply To” for each post, which you all saw in the last cut. In that one the link goes to the post page’s comment reply section, which at least cut out the intervening pages. At one point I realized the Reply To doesn’t need to be added for comments not yet approved (!) so I cleaned that up (see example).

Anyway, now the Reply To link (see example) opens up a small box with a submit button under the comment using javascript (see example). I added code to the edit-comment.php that now handles a submit query. Each “Reply To” opens up its own box/submit button for the owner’s (see example). On submission, it refreshes, staying on this comment management page (see example). Sorry, no ajaxy goodness at this step, perhaps at the next step if I can figure out how to hook into something similar as to what the approve/unapprove links are doing.

There are a few annoying points left, which I’m not entirely sure how addressable they are. For example, once you approve a post, you’ll need to refresh the page to get its Reply To link, since that part of the code is not hooked into the ajax that WP is using to do this. Ideally I’d like to tap into that, I’ll have to poke around some more. I also have a feeling I should be utilizing the Nonce security model as well.

If you’d like to test this out, please comment! I’d feel better if it were tested out on a few more sites before I release it out in the wild…