Using Comments As Post Updates Instead Of As Comments

At long last, my blog has a functionality I’ve long wanted but for some reason no one ever bothered to develop. It really should be its own thing, but since it isn’t: given that my blog doesn’t have comments, I’ve turned native, internal WordPress comments into a system for posting addenda on posts, rather than manually adding them to the post body itself. Now any time I want to add something to an existing post, on the backend at least each update will have its own timestamp. I’ll worry later about whether or not I want to include those timestamps on the public addenda themselves. For now, I’m just satisfied that I figured out how to get this displaying the way I wanted it to, after much consternation trying to get template tags to work the way I thought they were meant to be working.

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Addenda

1. For the purposes of demonstration, this is my first official addendum using WordPress comments instead of editing the post itself.

2. What I'm not going to even think about tonight is that for this to work I also need them displayed on index pages and anywhere else the full text of blog posts appear, e.g. on tag, date, and search pages.

3. Oh, I also seem to have a markup problem, in that the comment text is wrapped in p tags inside the li tags of the list, whereas that doesn't normally happen in lists. Another issue for Sunday daytime.

4. Went ahead and found the solution to that last one before I go to bed: using echo get_comment_text(); instead of comment_text();.

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Referring posts

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• Using a default theme now instead of a...