Apply Comment to Select Posts or Pages

Or perhaps I just make the CommentPress ‘theme’ only active on certain pages that I want it?

My that’s a lot of questions!

Is there a simple workaround so that I can turn on or turn off, or decide when I create a post/page whether to apply commentpress to it?

I am guessing the answer is probably more related to how I engineer the plugin to be activated for specified pages/posts rather than there being an internal easy way to do it?

Your guess is essentially correct.

Or I guess I just have to make the CommentPress look as similar as possible to my webpages so its not so radically different?

That’s one possible way forward.

Or some way to turn off commentpress on pages with comments closed? (which is what i want to do).

I am currently working on an internal switch to do just that. The switch will leave the CommentPress theme in place, however, so it may not be ideal for your needs. My immediate goal is to skip parsing the “page” post type and optionally remove the comments column when there are no comments and the page has commenting set to closed.

Or simply run commentpress posts on a secondary website, and somehow embed them into my main wordpress site? or simply link to them?

In the meantime, this is what I would do. Look at the instructions for CommentPress in a Multisite context.

Or perhaps if i run it in buddypress it will allow me to apply it to certain groups only?

This is also possible – and probably your best option. Have a look at the instructions for working with the BP Group Blog plugin. This allows each BuddyPress group to have an associated CommentPress-enabled sub-site. If you want multiple groups to have access to a multiple CommentPress sub-sites, then have a look at the BP Group Sites plugin, which enables many-to-many correspondences.

Or perhaps I just make the CommentPress ‘theme’ only active on certain pages that I want it?

I’d avoid that. See above.

Before diving in to an implementation, I’d recommend that you step back from the technical and focus on describing the functionality and workflow of site you want to create.

From the looks of things, my guess is that you’re planning to provide peer review via CommentPress but don’t want to adversely impact the public-facing main site. If that is the case, then I would strongly recommend the Multisite approach and either (or both) of the BuddyPress plugins to manage the relationship between the main site and the CommentPress sub-sites.

Many Thanks for taking the time to answer that. Yep I will step back as you say now and consider it. And yes well guessed. We want to develop open peer review for incoming work that both peers and public can comment in a two tier system of comments (something else i am thinking through). This document with the comments would then be saved (possibly statically) alongside an updated version, something along those lines. So yep I think running the peer review on a separate installation under a sub-domain interlinked into the main site. Will get back to you when I have something to share ??
Great plugin btw

So yep I think running the peer review on a separate installation under a sub-domain interlinked into the main site.

As I said, I’d recommend a Multisite install as your starting point.

BTW, I’d also recommend starting any customisation of a CommentPress theme with a child theme. There are starter packs for the original two column theme and the “modern” responsive theme on GitHub. There’s also a new parent theme ( variant of the “modern” theme) in the pipeline.

Look forward to seeing what you create.