Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

Threaded comments are a neat feature that you can add to your blog. Alexei Kosut has created a plugin-hack that will get you up and running with threaded comments. You will need to modify your database and two of your MT files. Then you'll need to make a lot of changes to your templates. Alexei's page has detailed instructions.

Important note: If you are using the Scriptygoddess "subscribe to comments" script, you will need to add two lines to processing.tmpl

<input type="hidden" name="parent_id" value="<? echo $parent_id ?>" />

<input type="hidden" name="subject" value="<? echo $subject ?>" />

If you don't do this, the parent_id and subject information will be lost when the comment is processed. When I first tried to set up threaded comments a couple of months ago, I didn't realize I needed to do this and I couldn't figure out why the information wasn't being written to my database. It was only after reading about a similar plugin-hack to add extra fields to comments, which explicitly mentioned editing processing.tmpl, that I realized what was going on. Sure enough, as soon as I added the two lines to processing.tmpl, threaded comments worked perfectly! Save yourself the headache and don't make my mistake!