We just pulled off threaded commenting.
I’m so proud of our team for this. We just brought Postmatic, and your blog if you are running it, to a whole new level.
Sometimes called nested commenting, or inline replies… but officially called threaded (nested) in the WordPress backend. Instead of comments being limited to a single stream or conversation you allow your users to reply to each other as well as the post itself.
Here are the two side-by-side:
This style of commenting does big things for helping users keep track of conversations within the larger framework of the post. Users can go off on tangents, reply directly to one another, and suddenly a single conversation can bloom into dozens.
We initially had decided not to support threaded commenting in our 1.0 release. In our early planning we were coming at it the wrong way and really hadn’t been able to nail it. It was confusing to know when you were replying to an existing comment versus leaving a new comment. You don’t get many interface options in email, and we want this whole thing to be perfectly simple.
After talking to 3 different fellow WordPress developers, all of whom we greatly admire (please! more of this! get in touch!), we came up with some ideas of how to pull it off. We spent the last four days retooling and i’m happy to say we got it right. So, starting with Beta 8 (available now) we will indeed have a 100% email experience for posting, reading, and replying to comments. It’s totally intuitive and now that it is done everything feels so much better.
How to turn it on
There’s not much you need to do. Postmatic will follow the lead of what you have already defined for your blog in Settings > Discussion. Turn on threaded commenting there and we’ll do the rest.
Give it a try
Threaded commenting is available right now on this very site. Give it a try by hitting reply or leaving a comment below. Nonsense comments accepted for the sake of science.
That’s all for now
We’re getting pretty close to declaring this thing 1.0. We have one more big feature in the works as well as few more importers to cook up. More next week. Have a great holiday.