Drupal Comments Spice-Up

With the sheer amount of modules available for Drupal, it is sometimes a tedious task to find one to solve a specific shortcoming of Drupal core. This is another article in my ongoing series about the hidden gems in Drupal’s repository. This time, it’s all about Comments.

The out-of-the-box comment display of Drupal 7 is very basic. Here’s a couple of nifty modules which make comments on a website a lot more enjoyable. From my point of view, most of the functionality added should be already available in the core comment module.

From the project page: “Provides comment sorting, comment form placement and comment form configuration settings. Drupal 7.x does not support newest-to-oldest comment sorting. This module addresses this gap in functionality and provides content-type level configuration for comment sorting.”

From the project page: “Comment Notify is a lightweight tool to send notification e-mails to visitors about new, published comments on pages where they have commented. Comment Notify works for both registered and anonymous users. Providing comment notifications for anonymous users is an important tool in bringing anonymous users back to your site, which helps convert anonymous users to registered users. Anonymous comment notification is a critical tool in building a blog comment community; all the major blogging platforms include this functionality.”

Very useful if you want to easily move the comment list to a different region of your theme. This module exposes the comment listing as a block which can be, for example, placed in regions using Context.

From the project page: “Replying to comments opens a comment form just below the replied-to comment, in a nice slide effect. Folding the 2nd+ depth comments for nice and clean UX. Folding the 1st depth comment list after X (default to 10, and can be set through the content type settings form) comments.”

From the project page: “A very simple module which would allow you to show all/any comments attached to all node translations. Just a great way to communicate in truly multi-lingual environments. For example I have node in English and Spanish. Drupal natural way would be to show comments for en/es translation separately (attached to en/es content). But i18n_comments will aggregate all English and Spanish comments for any translations. It doesn’t matter if user will leave a comment to any node translation.”