Better support for custom comment types

[ptahdunbar]

Similar to the improved support for custom post types #9674, we really need better support for custom comment types. At the database layer, this is completely supported and is used for post type comments, trackbacks and pingbacks. The code just needs to be decoupled into standard APIs.

Specifically, we'll need APIs for registering comment types, and comment statuses so the admin interface (edit-comments.php) can support them.

I'll be working on a patch, although feel free to provide your own patches, ideas and insights :)

Interesting idea. If comments were moved to be in the wp_posts table with post_type='comment' then a lot of functionality would come for free?

Cross-referencing #10856. Should be handled together.

Good idea , I will try to creating my patch also ...

Would love to see comments in the wp_posts table. There are infinite possiblities especially taxonomies for the comments etc.

Replying to gruvii:

Would love to see comments in the wp_posts table. There are infinite possiblities especially taxonomies for the comments etc.

I don't see this ever happening. That said, you can already do taxonomies on comments. That it's difficult (and that you don't really know about it) is more about deficiencies in the taxonomy system rather than the comments system.

Replying to nacin:

Cross-referencing #10856. Should be handled together.

I don't see why these two should be handled together. #10856 involves the migration/removal of a few columns from the comments table. This bug is about API's for comment type registration and handling... the comment_type column already exists.

Two years without a patch, so I'm closing. Reopen if there's a patch to be reviewed.

Re-closing as maybelater. If we do a comment/feedback loop in 3.5 or 3.6, this will almost certainly get hit.

I'd love to see this discussed again. Here's an example of why I'd like to use it:

In Easy Digital Downloads, we use comments on our payments post type to track info related to individual purchases, and also for allowing store owners to leave notes about individual orders. Comments work exceptionally well for this, except they start showing up in recent comment widgets, which is not optimal, especially when notes may contain sensitive information.

I'd love to be able to register a custom comment type that would be automatically excluded from recent comment streams (since they would only pull in core comment types by default). This would give us a much more granular level of control.

Replying to mordauk:

I'd love to see this discussed again.

+1. I'd like to build a plugin that uses comments for Twitter status updates tied to a Twitter Account periodic post (daily, weekly, monthly) with a parent post for Twitter account.

I'd also like to build another plugin that uses comments to manage support requests for a support ticketing system.

And another plugin that uses comments for suggested improvements to pages like how php.net has comments, but with the goal of improving the page, marking the suggestion complete, and then hiding the suggestion during normal page view. My use-case is for internal use for using WordPress for creating user documentation.