The way Brian’s Threaded Comments works revolves around a parent->child relationship between the comments. Each top-level comment has a list of children that are nested in a linear fashion with a reference to it’s immediate parent.
The new WordPress threaded comment system revolves around a series of functions that allow for similar parent->child relationships between comments. As a result, when you are replying to a nested comment, the system is aware of what comment you are replying to. This taxonomy is crucial to keeping track of which comment goes where. Without it, you have — a mess.
Secondary to the new WordPress comment posting system, is a walker function which allows you to traverse the comment database, and do neat things like proper pagination of long series of threaded comments.
To convert one system to the other, you will need to map the previous taxonomy to the new one. If you are unable to retain the relationships, the results will look like this:
PARENT
|___ child
|___ child
|___ child
|___ child
|___ child
Or
PARENT
|___ child
|___ child
|___ child
|___ child
|___ child
Rather than the correct series of relationships which may be this:
PARENT
|___ child
| |___ child
| |___ child
|
|___ child
|___ child
Yes, there should be a way to do this. No it doesn’t exist, and the method for the conversion will be different between each of the threaded commenting plug-ins due to their different database setups. Make sense?
