AjaxComments

One of the clients I'm working for needs a new discussion component to replace the MediaWiki talk page system entirely. It needs to add an area at the bottom of the page (an area marked by a div element that can be positioned appropriately) that allows comments to be added or replies made to existing comments. Authors will be able to edit or delete any comments they've made as long as there are no replies, and sysops can edit or delete any comments (deleting a comment with replies will also remove all the replies). The system will be entirely JavaScript and all requests done via Ajax. The discussion data will still be stored in the article's talk by the server-side Ajax handler.

Ajax requests

• Retrieve all comments (used to initially populate the discussion area) - default command - no parameters.
• Add a comment - a single parameter, the content of the new comment
• Reply to a comment - two parameters, the id of the comment being replied to and the new comment content
• Edit a comment - two parameters, the id of the comment and the new content
• Delete a comment - a single parameter being the id of the comment

All these items can be passed to a single server-side Ajax handler method having the first parameter as the command and the other one or two being the id/comment data for the command. Each command returns the HTML required to populate the appropriate area.

Discussion data

The data stored in the talk page needs to be in a format that is easy to match a particular comment for editing or for inserting a reply to. It should still make sense when the extension is disabled and the talk page edited normally.

The MediaWiki Ajax handler should return the discussion in JSON format so that there is minimal reliance on the server-side for rendering the discussion thus making the system more portable. Probably in the form of a simple array with fields for user, data, html content and depth would be best. The comments can be identified simply by their numeric index into the array.

The data can be stored as wikitext in the talk page as normal headings followed by a line for the username, a line of the date, then the rest being the comment content.

• maybe the JSON should return the data in its proper hierarchical form as it will need to be rendered in hierarchical form
• maybe the server should in fact return HTML since only the server knows what edit/delete links to add since it has the user/group info

Done

This has been finished already, there's still a few finishing touches to do. The source code is in our Subversion repository here.

features

• Activates automatically for articles that have discussion pages removing discussion tab and adding a comments section below the article content
• Allows registered users to add comments or reply to existing comments
• Allows comments that a user has previously created to be edited or deleted as long as they have not been replied to yet
• All comment interaction is done via Ajax so that the page is never reloaded
• Comment editing integrates properly with wikitext by retrieving the comment source via ajax
• The data that makes up the comments is stored in the talk page but is not in a humanly readable format
• The talkpage data is able to coexist with existing talk page content and is delineated by headings so it's clearly visible to avoid accidental editing

Issues

• The comment data is stored in the articles talk page, but is currently not human readableand does not work with existing talk page content
• The date/time of posts is not currently displayed in the users timzone or with their time formatting preferences
• At the moment, the most recent comments are first, but some sites may prefer most recent at the bottom

Example

The extension is now running on this site - you can test it below.