Okay, it was messy but I got it working. All the individual photo pages on my site now take comments. Check it out: https://kiramarch.com/photo.php?id=0208%20outside.jpg&tag=favorites
(Yes, I know flickr does all this and more, but I wanted a more sophisticated tagging system than flickr supports, and I needed a project to learn php on.)
The only thing I haven’t gotten working is the Ajax plugin (it’s still doing fine on my WP pages, though).
Here’s what I had to do:
Add to my DB structure
– new table with my page ID and an autonumber
– new ID field in my main data table. Uses a negative number corresponding to the autonumber in the translation table…this way it will never bump into WP posts and mix up comments.
– auto-fill that new negative ID number each time I add a page
change my page template to incorporate the comments
– added calls to get_post (fills in the data wp needs to write the comments) and comment_template (displays and solicits the comments)
– if i want to get ajax plugin turned on, must add the includes in the header by hand (I’m not using the wp header)
Then in functions.php:
– changed get_post to set global $id, since it has to be shared among more functions now
– get_post handles the negative number fine, it turns out
Changes to comment-functions.php
– In comments_template function, added access to global $id and conditional so that it will execute with neg number
– Also added a couple new cases so that it doesn’t look up negative IDs in the wp_posts table, since it won’t find anything.
– In wp_insert_comment…put in one new condition that assumes comments are open on all photo pages.
Then wp-comments-post.php, which is what the add a comment form calls
– Skipped the status check if the ID is negative
And finally, in comments.php:
– Construct and pass optional redirect location because it won’t know what to reload on its own
– Pointed a redirect to an anchor to make the reloading less annoying (until/unless I get the ajax plugin working)
– Changed the comment section heading to static because it was looking up info about the posts. Static doesnt bother me, but I could have skipped it just for the hacked pages if I cared.
All done!
