[development] Styling comment blocks according to vote results

[Larry Garfield]

That's not quite how I'd do it, but it's close.

You probably don't want that sort of logic in comment.tpl.php.  Instead, I'd 
have a theme function that themes, well, a class. :-)  Pass it your raw data 
or some partially processed version thereof, and it returns a simple class 
string that you assign to the comment.  A simple implementation could be:

// Number of votes for each rating
$scores = array(1=>5, 2=>3, 4=> 7, 6=> 2);

theme_mysummary($scores) {

  // Get an average of all scores, or a median, or whatever
  
  if ($avg < 2) return 'sucks';
  if ($avg < 4) return 'ok';
  if ($avg < 7) return 'good';
  return 'rocks';

}

Then you just assign the string returned from that theme function as a class 
of the comment with a prefix, say "mysummary-{$summaryclass}".

And the rest is up to CSS.  Since it's a theme function you can easily 
override it in template.tpl.php with whatever logic you want for a given 
site.

At least that's my early morning thought on the matter before I've had my 
morning up of tea. :-)

On Tuesday 16 January 2007 6:26 am, Ben Campbell wrote:
> Hi there - I'm working on a system to change the appearance of comments
> based on how people rate them. So highly rated comments would appear
> bigger and brighter than badly-rated comments.
>
> The voting API abstracts away the rating mechanism nicely (so in theory
> you could pick any voting module to drive the ratings system).
>
> But I'm not 100% sure of the best way to apply different looks to
> differently rated comments.
>
> My current thinking is that it'll have to be pretty tied to a theme -
> I'd pass some sort of rating metric into comment.tpl.php as an extra
> parameter and the template applies an appropriate style (probably one of
> a range of styles defined in a stylesheet).
>
> Does this sound like a sane way to do it?
> Does anyone have any suggestions of approaches I could take to
> generalise it a little? It'd be nice to decouple it from the theming as
> much as possible so others can take advantage of it.
>
> Thanks!
> Ben.

-- 
Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
larry at garfieldtech.com		ICQ: 6817012

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of 
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