Trusted Commenters ...

First, how do I moderate comments? I searched the forums but came up dry.

Second, I would like to create groups of trusted ‘commenters’ using criteria TBD but nothing fancy. These dudes would comment without moderation. What is the most straightforward method for making it so? Can I do this programmatically per some criteria (for instance, if I have approved 25 previous comments)?

Hi Russ,

Currently there’s no real way to do what you’re talking about. Given that though, the Commenting system in MODx is the next major blogging component I’d like to see addressed. I would love to see your ideas here and to see you help shape the future of power-blogging in MODx.

(BTW, your name is really familiar... where have I seen it before?)

Are you saying there is no way to inspect comments and delete them - just use the snippet to display them. Oooh, that’s bad and I don’t mean bad-is-good in this case. Come to think of it, there is no place in the manager to inspect comments, is there? Wow.

I am most surprised that this wasn’t built into the ModX architecture from the beginning and curious why.

A slightly related question: is/will it/when will it be possible to integrate forum-style threads into documents/posts?

Now, assuming the above, here is what I would like:

a) Treat comments as just a special class of an ordinary document/post from Manager’s point-of-view.
a1) Comments from web users are just like any document but are associated as children to their containing parent document.
a2) Comments from guests are treated likewise but in their own group (still allow user input of names and email addresses, of course).

b) Treat the display of comments as customized syntactic sugar TBD by designers. This way, documents submitted by users can be treated as posts, comments or some-other-kind-of-submitted document type depending on the application requirement.

Perhaps trusted commenters then fall naturally out of a1 above. Named web users and/or users with a given role would-or-could, by definition, be trusted commenters.

This is off the top-of-my-head before coffee. I reserve the right to decide it is moronic. OTOH, it’s you guys who don’t feature comment moderation

(Update: how are comments stored currently? Sorry, I really am a newbie, still trying to decide if ModX is ready-for-my-prime-time.)

You can definitely inspect and manage comments from the manager. Comments are created as a document inside the origianl article (which becomes a folder if you have that option flagged). Comments are not created as individual documents currently, but it should be easy to modify the UserComments snippet to accomplish that. Then you’d just use newslisting to display them.

Quote from: rthrash at Feb 22, 2006, 09:20 AM

(BTW, your name is really familiar... where have I seen it before?)

Me I have seen it on... textpattern’s forum !

Sheesh, guys. Ryan and I had exchanged some emails. I’m a weird blend of an old-timer and someone who uses CMS heavily but rarely posts (or has rarely posted) on most of the forums. The below may make it sound like I’m a somebody with the name-dropping but I am a truly ordinary, if power, end-user. I suppose my one claim to usefulness is I’ve seen a lot and used to have a knack for spotting and working with winners.

I’m not very smart, though. I had a one-on-one for 90 minutes with Bill Gates in 1988 (?). He tried to persuade me that the soon-to-be released Visual Basic was just the thing for expert systems applications. Idiotic. Yes, he rocked back-and-forth. No, he didn’t hire me - perhaps because I was too much of an idiot to ask. Notice the symmetry?

I had many years of experience (and consulting to a wide range of Fortune 500ers). This included Lotus/IBM - mainly Ray Ozzie’s company (Iris Associates), the dudes who created Lotus Notes. Late in the game, I wrote a fairly definitive architecture paper about Notes (ca. 1998). You know, Notes was wicked cool once upon a time (1990?) .... also a bit of consulting to Groove. I did a weblog (didn’t know the name) in Notes in 1997 for our sure-to-succeed golf equipment venture on the Web. That was buried in the bubble tsunami of 2000. My golf game has always reaped the benefits.

I got involved with hypertext/hypermedia in the mid-1980s, precursing the Web. My most hilarious consulting project was doing a help application for Morgan Stanley bond traders in 1994 (?) with Netscape 0.9. This was so ancient it was pre-blinking text. Yup. They loved it. Don’t ask. My best memory on the trading floor is ridiculously well-paid programmers ($200K/yr) racing to a bond trader’s desk like galley slaves to explain to them which key on the keyboard to hit to get something done.

(I had great fun crashing a hands-only Netscape meeting around that same time where Barksdale told the cheering mob that they would surely crush Microsoft. Um. Err.)

I am a fan and acquaintance of Dave Winer; he will always appreciate the tickets to the final game of the Yanks-Mets world series ... though the Mets lost, alas. My oldest son had cadged press passes for he/I (not Dave who sat in the bleachers; my son and I). We sat with all the big sports coverage dudes and attended the post-game player press conferences. My son used his cell to call his friends while ESPN had their camera trained on us. We were standing right behind Jerek Deter. Heh. I think they knew we were imposters. Hmm. There is a theme to this post I didn’t intend. And no, I’m not making my life up . Don’t we all do fun stuff? I did some doc work for Radio and was a passionate user of Manila-Radio until it stopped progressing. Dave is enormously difficult but a genius. OPML, his latest passion (I still think he should have used my proposed name when the community was debating that in 2000-ish), will be huge. ModXers take note.

Enough rattling. It’s what happens when you get old.

ModX looks exceedingly interesting but it is weird. That could be great; that might not be so great. I ain’t decided yet because I don’t understand it yet. That also could be great or not so great ....

(Oh and what am I doing now? I have always been involved in Christian ministry; now I’m serving a small group of Christians in Spokane, WA full-time and meditating the creation of a collaborative environment for churches. I want to use Expression Engine but would prefer a free product; churches are stupid-cheap. Believe it or not, we’re using Basecamp at the moment with amazing success, considering the obvious.)

Wow...
Glad to have you here RussLipton.

The only reason we don’t have that built in in our core architecture, because it’s just part of the snippets/modules, which means we don’t have to support it inside the core to make a full-bloated core that later cannot be extended.

That’s why we have some other users who are extensively working on the snippets/modules that can be add up to the core to make a more functional CMS system on top of this CMF system. If you notice the different on F and S after the CM, then you will realize that we are going more towards the F.
CMF= Content Management Framework
CMS= Content Management System

The F can be extended to S, while the S cannot be extended to F without major refactoring of the core base system.
Hope it gives you a clear view of what MODx is, and help you decide whether you’re going to use this software or not.

Sincerelly,

Oh, look, please no wow. If you live long enough, you accumulate stories. If I were really successful, I wouldn’t live in Spokane now. Ask people who live in Seattle; they will totally get that.

(Though I must tell DavidM my Paris story sometime; eating my way through Paris for 18 months, all expenses paid thanks to Bull Systems. Even I forget how much fun I’ve had - and how many failures too.)

Seriously, if I can get my mind wrapped around ModX enough to offer useful questions and perhaps some positive criticism, I will.

(.... and I’m enough of a geekazoid to wish vainly that all of this were in Ruby. I’m an anti-PHP snob personally; it’s so ugly. Then again, Notes was nasty. I know that usability for real people carries the day; but I don’t have to like it.)

Really, my biggest concerns can only be answered a year from now - what is the staying power of the product/community; are releases reasonably predictable; can ModX handle serious performance/robustness challenges? The early reports look promising but I’ve seen way too many of those over the years to be persuaded. Expression Engine already delivers the goods there and also has a great team/community. Thankfully, this isn’t a zero-sum game; expertise with more than one tool is helpful.

Anyway, see you on some other threads, without all the personal stuff just adding to the noise.

Well Russ let’s say wow anyway... quite an experience here, pretty impressive curriculum...

And yes, I’d be glad to share about your experiences with Bull (what a disastrous french company...)

When you say "used to have a knack for spotting and working with winners"

Used to ? Well to me it seems you still have it
Seing you @textpattern’s and here is enough to convince me ! (and might I say, did you notice I run Expression Engine on my blog That is, till MODx is able to do just the same which with Mark’s development pace of NewsListing will undoubtedly be soon....)

Even if I have not seen a lot yet, I think I too have a knack for spotting if not winners, great promising projects...
Not that there isn’t room for improvement of course, but given the enthusiasm, talent and potential right now, I have no doubt MODx/Tattoo will make it to the top

Well, one last story for you David and then I will shut up; have to if only to get back to ’real’ work:

I was a very junior member of a very senior team led by my father-in-law (1985-86). We were auditing GCOS 7 and 8 (gag us with many spoons). The CEO (name slips at the moment) was truly on-board but there was simply zero motivation at any other level to change the culture. Mitterand was running stuff; Bull was nationalized and, well, don’t get me started.

We always liked to say (and truly believe) that if the French were as great at software as cuisine, they would rule the world. But, with admiration, we figured they had made the wiser choice.

(Bull execs did ask us to try not to eat at more than one one-star restaurant a week. Heh. We got to a point where we almost dreaded going out to eat. Dinners would end at 9 and we would walk, joyously stuffed and slightly inebriated, through central Paris to our sick-wonderful apartment in the 7th, on the Seine, directly overlooking the Louvre.)

One of their top execs once asked my father-in-law: "do you know why we retained you?" (By the way, he made $3K a day. Correct. They only retained him about 200 days that year.)

My father-in-law answered: "No, why?"

He said, "Because we French are the best people in the world at thinking about what we should do between Monday and Friday. But we need you guys to come in the following Monday and tell us to go do it."

I have never forgotten that ... or Paris. My now grown oldest-two of five were then young and have indelibly wonderful memories of the city and early schooling with kids from 40 countries. I took them on the metro to the English school in the 16th, hard by a wonderful place (and that is saying something) where I stopped for croissants .

Major sigh.