Why would you want your audience to be able to comment about a page?
Put it this way; one of the most commonly requested site features is the ‘contact form’ - it’s pretty much industry standard to enable your users to get in touch with you, usually through a form. The form also serves to protect you from spambots - so you don’t have to list your email address on your site.
How do we do this within the tank framework? Well, let’s say you create a page called ‘contact’. You specify that page to enable comments. In effect, you have now created a ‘contact form’. Simply create another ‘thanks’ page with ‘contact’ as a parent, and your reader is redirected to the ‘thanks’ page afterwards - which you can fully content manage too. The entire process should take only a couple of minutes to complete.
Had we planned it this way? No, not really. It was just another piece of the puzzle that neatly clicked together much further down the road. We’re big fans of emergence.
I see page commenting all over the web (on the more 'together' sites at least); easy way to allow for online help, or building up faqs that people can actually interact with. It's not a new idea but I like the way you guys have both available. Clever, using it as a contact form. Can be handy for other applications as well.
I assume all comments are viewable and moderated through the backend as well? When do we get to see that?
Yes.. page commenting is not new. The more "corporate" websites generally won't have it, but I often see it on the typical opensource project's website. I doubt we'll use it often, but "running comments" on www.e-vent.co.za uses it and it is quite handy for things like contact/feedback forms and bug reports.
Things can be approved/unapproved, removed or deleted. Removed differs from being deleted because it is still in the database, it just doesn't get displayed. Useful for when a conversation is taking place and one person says something dodgy. If you delete the comment it is gone and the flow of converstion is messed up. So you flag it as "removed" and then the template might display "This comment was removed because it was inappropriate." next to the person's name. Kindof like a slap on the wrists ;) Deleting, on the other hand, is handy for getting rid of spam.
What's also happening at e-vent is the userbase there is giving me ongoing and immediate feedback regarding the switch to the new site: another handy 'emergent' aspect might be that while you are building a site you can use page comments to keep track of changes, or ask your userbase to comment whether it works for them or not. Simply delete or disable the comments once you go live.
Hi. Good site.