How to do comments definitely needs to be discussed in depth as it is certainly not straightforward.
Simple Gallery has several view states, including album thumbs, image thumbs, and three variations of a full-size image, with possibly more to come in future.
The question is how to integrate a rating and commenting system into this without getting into a complicated mess.
My suggestion is to create a new module for handling the receipt and display of comments. Then, tie this new module to the various Simple Gallery view states by using a couple of new tokens.
The new tokens would show: a short line of rating stars, and a link “Comments XX”
This is very brief and could be added to all view states without major drama.
The Stars would ideally be one of those mouse-over-click-to-rate type of things that are in use everywhere these days. The Comments XX would link to the location of a new module.
The new satellite module would handle the display of comments for all slide show variations. This new module should be able to shown anywhere as it would not be a fixed part of the slideshow.
It would be nicely template-able like other Ventrian modules with tokens for a thumbnail image, comments, rating, paging, comment form and so on. There would be view options for making it show the latest commented , most commented, least commented, most viewed, highest rated, lowest rated and whatever else is desired.
And this is very important: The comments module would therefore be usable either on a homepage as a shortlist of latest comments or on the same page as the gallery module itself. The whole point of commenting and rating site content is to create interactivity and therefore traffic. This can only be fully realised if one can draw such content out to the homepage.
Also, I don’t know if this would be possible, but it would be cool:
If it were on the same page as the gallery, it could display comments in context with the gallery’s current view state. For example, if one is viewing album thumbs, it would display latest comments for those albums, if one is looking at image thumbnails, it would display the last x comments for any of the visible thumbs. When one clicks through to a particular image inline, it would display comments just for that image.
So.. my suggestion here is to make the management and display of comments done in a separate module that is tied to all view states of the gallery by just a couple of items: Rating stars and Comments XX
The above suggestions solve the issue with integration into various slideshows by not trying to crow-bar actual comments into them, and it also provides the means for pulling the new content out to the front of the site. The only thing is does not do is display comments directly alongside the lightbox and popup views.. but I feel that, by design, those are not intended to be cluttered up with stuff anyway... the rating and comment tokens linking to the comments module would be plenty.
Scott will of course know better if any of this is possible at all.
Rob |