[pmwiki-users] comments per paragraph

[Emre Sahin]

Hi,

First of all thanks for this great piece of software.

I'm using pmwiki mostly as a customized blog/cms in
http://emresahin.net.  I don't like my text to be edited so I turned
that off. However, there are places where a feedback from readers
might be good. I checked various comment recipes but neither suited me
fully.

I want a comment recipe like the comments in:

http://book.realworldhaskell.org/beta/whyfp.html

Each paragraph should end in a comments sections which is foldable
(via JavaScript perhaps) and shown when necessary.  Users must be able
to add their comments by clicking these and entering their info.

As far as I know, there is not a recipe which provides this
functionality. There may be some which provide as a basis but I'm not
sure about this.

I'm eager to add such a package to pmwiki. Now questions:

1) What should I know before trying to add this? I'm programming in
several languages for 10+ years (but not PHP), so you can point me
directly to the code. I think I can learn PHP for this.

2) I think keeping comments within a page is the most tidy solution.
Each paragraph should end in some tags like

The paragraph.(:comments:)(:comment from="John Doe" email=john at doe.com
published=yes:)Very good paragraph! (:commentend:)(:commentsend:)

and those tags should be processed. Each submitted page should be
scanned for paragraph endings and turned to this format.

I don't want to use database (and bringing an extra dependency) and
keeping comments in separate pages requires to match comments with
paragraphs. The above way seems simplest and suitable to pmwiki
philosophy I think.

What do you think about this architecture? Does it break some other recipes?

3) I think skin support is necessary for JavaScript based comments, is
it so? What can be the alternative?

4) I think authors can moderate comments directly changing (:comment
published=no :) to (:comment published=yes:) However it should notify
authors about comments somehow. Is it usable?

5) Asking simple questions like "What's the third letter of pmwiki?"
seems a better alternative than visual captcha for spam Questions can
be set site-wide, page-wide and group-wide... Is it easy, effective
and usable enough?

Thanks.

Emre