collective.discussionplus

Introduction

This package provides some enhancements to Plone's standard commenting functionality. It attempts to keep as much of the existing commenting machinery as possible, but adds the following features:

Events:

• An IObjectAddedEvent is fired when a discussion item (described by the interface Products.CMFCore.interfaces.IDiscussionResponse) is created.
• Similarly, an IObjectRemovedEvent is fired when a discussion item is deleted.

Indexing:

• Content items gain two additional catalogue indexes: number_of_comments, which contains the number of comments left on a content item, and commentators, which contains a list of unique usernames of those who have left one or more comments on the content item. number_of_comments is also available as catalogue metadata.
• Collections are configured so that it is possible to search by these indexes. For example, the 'Current author' criterion can be used to list all content items upon which the current user has left a comment.
• Discussion items gain an additional catalogue metadata column, comment_subject, which contains the title of the content item that was commented upon (note that this is not updated if the content item changes title).

Workflow:

• Discussion items will respect the workflow set in portal_workflow. By default, the one_state_workflow is used, which means a comment is always published. An additional comment_review_workflow is installed, which has two states: pending and published. Comments may either be published or deleted.
• A new view, @@review-comments, is available for any folder or the portal root. This allows site-wide (or folder-wide) moderation of comments, with quick publish/delete operations.

Note that the @@review-comments view makes a few assumptions:

• Comments pending review are always in the pending state. You can add a review_state request parameter to specify a different state to search for, however.
• There is a transition called publish to move a comment from pending to published. You can request a different transition by providing a request parameter publish_transition.

Furthermore:

• The number_of_comments index will only include comments in the published state.
• Neither the portal_catalog Clear and rebuild, nor the portal_workflow Update security settings operation will correctly find and update comments, due to the way that comments are stored.

Requirements

This product requires Plone 3.3+ (and will likely not work with Plone 4). In particular, it relies on plone.indexer, which is part of Plone 3.3+.

Changelog

1.0b2 - 2009-04-17

• Catch up to Plone 3.3