Development:Comments 2.0

Objectives

The goals of comments 2.0:

Manage comments centrally
Use a consistent approach for all comments throughout Moodle
Easily integrate comments 2.0 with existing modules

Overview

The comments 2.0 provides APIs to:

Add comments
Update comments

And provides an ajax interface to allow adding comments on a floating DIV.

Comments database table

Field	Type	Default	Info
id	int(10)	auto-incrementing	The unique ID for this comment.
user_id	int(10)		who wrote this comment
contextid	int(10)		The context id defined in context table - identifies the instance of plugin owning the comment.
itemid	int(10)		Some plugin specific item id (eg. forum post, blog entry or assignment submission)
comment_area	int(10)		for example, in user profile, you can comment user's description or interests, but they share the same itemid(==userid), we need comment_area to separate them
timecreated	int(10)
timemodified	int(10)
content	text		content of comment

Comments API

lib/weblib.php

Add an option to format_text function

Using this format_text function will add a comment icon automatically at the end of the text:

For example, using the following code in the forum module will add a comment icon to every post:

$cmt = new stdclass; $cmt->contextid = $modcontext->id; $cmt->area = 'format_post'; $cmt->itemid = $post->id; $cmt->summary = substr(strip_tags($post->message), 0 ,10); $options->comments = $cmt;

echo format_text($post->message, $post->messageformat, $options, $course->id)."

";

lib/commentlib.php

class comment()

__construct($contextid, $comment_area, $itemid))

js()

Print Javascript required by commenting API, this is a static function, which must be called before html head printed</head>

init($return = false)

Will print the html snippet for commenting UI, will be called inside format_text

print_comments($params = array())

print comments

add($content, $parent_id)

Add comment to database

delete($id)

delete a comment

edit($id, $content)

Edit a comment

Javascript API

Can be found in lib/comment.js

do_comment(client_id)

Submit a comment

show_comments(event, contextid, comment_area, itemid, page, client_id)

Pup up the comments floating window

get_cmt(ctx, area, itemid, page, client_id)

Load comments by AJAX

Documentation