I noticed Les had some quicktags for formatting comments in his blog, so, inquiring, I got a pointer to the Comment Form Quicktags plugin. As this is a feature I had in the old MT version of my blog, and have had occasional requests for it back (waves at Avo), I wanted to oblige.
Unfortunately, it’s messing up the formatting of the comments form a bit — rendering the text far smaller than it ought to be. It’s not clear why — the details seem lost in the bowels of the Javascript. The same problem occurs with the similar MarcTV Comment Quicktags plugin. Since it doesn’t happen on Les’ blog, I assume it’s a bad drug interaction with the Thesis theme.
Anyway, I’m going to leave it active for the moment, until I figure out what’s going on. It’s useful enough technology that I think it outweighs the problem (which I hope will be shortlived).
It’s definitely something around Thesis (the theme here), dagnabbit. Just installed the plugin over on Blog of Heroes and it’s working swimmingly.
Oddly enough, prompted by your request, I started looking for a replacement because the WP Admin part of Comment Quicktags doesn’t work for me. I send you an IM with what seems like a nice replacement that also includes a comment preview function — that being another plugin that just doesn’t work at all with the themes I’ve used — so it’s two plugins in one.
Which is funny because the admin portion works just fine for me.
I may try out the JQuery plugin — I worry a bit about (a) anything that is version 0.2, and (b) all the diddling it seems to ask for in the CSS. I also want to give the Thesis support forum folks a chance to laugh at me about my request.
I didn’t have to do any diddling of the CSS for the jQuery plugin. I just dropped it in, checked the settings, and it worked right off the bat.
Well, alas, the jQuery plugin doesn’t work under Thesis at all (have not tested on other system). Bother.
Upgraded another small blog I have to the latest version of Thesis. No discernible change. Annoying.
I have to admit that is one of the more frustrating things about WordPress. I have never used a blogging package where the template you’re using could interfere with the plugins you’re using. Under ExpressionEngine I never ran into a plugin I couldn’t use simply because of the theme I had going at the time.
But then WP’s themes are a nightmare compared to EE and MT.
I never got into themes in MT — I started with it early enough that my templates were a hardcoded mess, which is why when I finally decided I needed to upgrade to something, it made as much sense to look outside the fold as anything else.
I agree that the way themes can interfere with plugins is dismaying. Up until now, I’ve been pleased enough with Thesis that it made sense to use it on a couple of my blogs (and consider it on others). It provides a very convenient framework for modifying stuff — but that’s clearly at a cost of interoperabilty.
That ThemeFrame development package looked promising enough that I signed up for it with a bit of cash I got from doing a small bit of side IT work for a friend’s company. It’s a bit involved setting it up as it requires you to install a local Apache/PGP/MySQL setup, but that’s relatively easy to do using WAMP (which they suggest).
It’s made by the same folks who make the Atahualpa theme I’ve been using at SEB — a theme about as close to Thesis as you can get for free. From what I’ve seen so far ThemeFrame starts you off with the base Atahualpa layout and allows you to pretty much modify everything from right in the browser with simple right clicks and real-time results. You can use the finished themes on as many blogs as you want and can even sell them. Haven’t played with it enough to see if you can radically change the layout, but it’s impressive so far.
Cool.
I have gotten a couple of responses from the Thesis boards that I’m trying out, but no joy. Ditto for the jQuery author.
Well, I seem to have solved the problem. Somehow the CFQ plugin was changing the base size of an em to something a lot smaller. By putting in a custom CSS line (easy to do in Thesis) to set an actual pixel size for the textarea, everything is back to normal. (Actually better than normal — I think the text for the comment boxes used to be smaller than the normal text; I’ve changed it to the same size.)
My thanks to the Thesis forum folks for some initial responses, and to the Inspect Element feature in Chrome for helping me see what was actually affecting the formatting in the form box.
Yes, this is much nicer. Thanks very much!
🙂
You’re welcome. As long as you don’t abuse
theprivilege.