Too many comments!

[ryanhellyer]

I wrote a post on my blog about five weeks ago and it has been very popular. I'm up to 92 comments so far! This is great, but it comes with an annoying side effect. The comments are now quite drawn out and are taking up the majority of the page and is causing the page to take quite a while to download and it is only going to get worse.

Here's the particular blog post ... Suckerfish WordPress Plugin | Ryan Hellyer

What do you guys think is the best approach to avoiding this problem?

I could paginate the comments, but would I be best having the first comments appear on the main page or the more recent ones? Or perhaps I should just have a link at the bottom of the page to the full list of comments? Or is there a better solution?

[duellevel]

You should paginate it and have the recent comments appear on the main page. Add the page navigation above your comments with a 'show all' link.

[ryanhellyer]

Thanks duellevel.

That was the approach I was most in favour of. Now I need to figure out how to put theory into practice :P

[BigAlReturns]

Hmm it could be trickyish to implement what with having to use WPs templating system. Is there not a plugin that can do it?

[ryanhellyer]

Originally Posted by BigAlReturns

Hmm it could be trickyish to implement what with having to use WPs templating system. Is there not a plugin that can do it?

Probably, but I'm pretty sure it could be done within the template too. I generally try to avoid plugins. I'll have a crack at it in a few weeks and let you know how I get on. There is probably a tutorial on how to do it somewhere, and if not I may make one of my own.

[BigAlReturns]

Just out of interest, you've obviously got a lot of visits because of that post - have you seen many of these visitors subscribe to your feeds?

[ryanhellyer]

My feeds are controlled by WordPress itself which unfortunately doesn't track the number of subscribers. It does track the number of hits to the feed link though and that has doubled. I imagine the feed for the comments for the post probably has a few subscribers too, although I haven't checked.

The total traffic to my site has increased by about 20x since I made the plugin, so a (very approximate) 2x increase in feed subscribers is not particularly significant.

There would be little point in people subscribing to my main blog feed though as most of the posts are about things entirely unrelated to web design.

[ryanhellyer]

I've found a plugin which can paginate comments ... Keyvan Minoukadeh » WordPress Paged Comments Plugin

However I'm not having much luck figuring out how to do it without using the plugin. I'm sure it must be possible though so I'll keep trying!

[ryanhellyer]

I've given up on building it into the theme as it seems that the plugin I linked to above is doing a brilliant job itself.

Here is the final product ... Suckerfish WordPress Plugin | Ryan Hellyer

The plugin gives you the ability to control whether the comments are ascending or descending, how many are shown per page and a bunch of other options. Integration with your theme is quite easy too. It took about 5 mins to install, configure and custom integrate with my theme

[duellevel]

Nice and clean Ryan.

When my site gets enough comments I will use that plugin :P