Showing your Comments month-by-month

Apr 15

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We’re giving away $25 at the end of April. You can win by leaving a comment, subscribing to our email feed, or by linking back to WebDiggin.

But we also wanted a quick and easy way to list all of the ballots that we have received so far.

Finding who had posted a link to us was easy. They just leave a comment on our $25 contest post and we follow them back to their site.
Finding all of our email subscribers was also easy. Feedburner will show you all of the email addresses.
But listing all of the comments on your blog for a specific month… that was a headache.

Finding a Good Wordpress Comment Plugin

There are scads of good wordpress comment plugins out there. We don’t need to tell you about them. Just google it.

Because we are running a month long contest and were only interested in the comments of a specific month, most of the plugins didn’t work for us.
We were hopeful about Some Random Dude’s Month Comment Count plugin but it only counts the number of comments made in the month. It doesn’t output the comments as well.

In the end, Scott Reilly’s Coffee 2 Code Customizable Comment Listing plugin was the most flexible plugin for our needs. (But, it wasn’t very user friendly. If you were afraid of dealing with a little code, it might not be the best plugin for you. v2.0 was a little better, but still…)

The Customizable Comment Listing plugin was great. You could list comments without including your own comments or backlinks or pingbacks. You had complete control over what list of comments you produced… comment excerpts, comment authors, post info were all at your fingertips.

You can display the most recent comments and commentators, but unfortunately, Scott’s code doesn’t allow you to limit your comment listing to a specific month. For example, to find out who commented in April of 2008. So we modified it.

A modified Coffee 2 Code Customizable Comment Listing Plugin that lets you list the comments for a specific month.

Scott publishes his plugin with modification and redistribution rights:

Permission is hereby granted … without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software…

We’re not code monkeys. We don’t really know what we’re doing… only that through trial and error, we were able to tweak Scott’s plugin to fit our needs. Perhaps you, or Scott, can figure out a more elegant solution.

Here’s what we did. It works for us, does it work for you?

We downloaded Scott Reilly’s Coffee 2 Code Customizable Comment Listing plugin.
We changed the plugin to look like this: customizable-comment-listings
We use the following code to create a list of comments made in April 2008:

<?php c2c_get_comments(2008,4,300,”<li>%comment_author_URL% (%comment_date%) commented on %post_URL% <br/><em>%comment_excerpt%</em></li>”,”comments”,”comment”, “1″, “”, “DESC”,0,”m/d/Y”); ?>

It’s exactly the same as Scott’s code, except we added the year and the month before the rest of his arguments: (Scott’s function c2c_get_comments has the following arguments. We simply added $year and $month at the top of the list.)
$year, $month, $limit, $format, $mode, $types, $status, $ids, $order, $offset, $date_format
His other 3 functions (c2c_get_recent_comments, c2c_get_top_commenters, and c2c_get_recent_commenters), probably won’t work any more because they don’t include a year or a month. (But they never really worked for us anyways, so we weren’t too worried about modifying them.)

Bottom Line: Does anyone have a simpler way of listing the comments on a blog for a specific month?

Question: If you’re running a contest and counting up the comments for a specific month, how do you find the comments?