Smart Comments for Movable Type

If you take a look at the front page of this Weblog, you’ll notice that, unlike most Movable Type Weblogs, the comment count doesn’t say "0 comments, 1 comments, 2 comments." Instead, it is grammatically correct and, if there is only one comment, the singular is used.

Movable Type provides an option for inserting a count of an entry’s comments, but only the number is inserted, leaving the site owner to fill in the word "comments" or "replies." This creates a problem in that if a template developer wishes to say "1 reply" instead of the incorrect "1 replies," they are unable to do so.

So how is this done?

There are various workarounds available in the Movable Type support forums for grammatically correct comment counts using JavaScript, Extended SSIs, or PHP, but these methods require server-side processing or the presence of JavaScript in the user’s browser.

Enter regular expressions. Regular expressions (regex) allow powerful text matching and replacement and are available in most scripting languages, including Perl and JavaScript. And now Brad Choate has written a regex plugin that allows Movable Type templates to use them as well.

To use the template code that comes next, you will need to have both the regex plugin and Brad Choate’s global tag plugin installed in your plugins directory.

With those plugins installed, you can then use the MTAddRegex tag inside your entry templates.

Let’s examine a typical template’s code for displaying the comment count.

<a href="<MTEntryLink>"><$MTEntryCommentCount$> replies</a>

We have created a link using a href that ends with >. Immediately following, we have a number representing how many comments there are, followed by the word "replies" and the close of the anchor tag(</a>)

Here’s what the output of this would look like for 0, 1, and 2 comments:

0 replies
1 replies
2 replies

If there are no comments, we’d like to simply display "Reply" and if there is one comment for an entry we’d like to display "1 reply." Entries with two or more replies will continue to look the same.

First, you will need to add two regex replace commands to the top of your template.

<MTAddRegex name="reply0">s|>0 replies|>Reply|g</MTAddRegex>
<MTAddRegex name="reply1">s|>1 replies|>1 reply|g</MTAddRegex>

The first line searches for the end of the link code, followed by "0 replies" and replaces it with the text >Reply. The second line searches for >1 replies and replaces it with >1 reply. The > character is included at the beginning of each search and replace so to make sure we replace the right thing. If one of your entries happens to contain the text "0 replies," you wouldn’t want to accidentally replace it with "Reply." We’ve also given each regex tag a name so that we can refer to them later.

Now that we have put the regex commands into the template, we need to tell your template to use them.

Change your MTEntries tag to include an attribute called regex that contains the names of the regex tags we created: <MTEntries lastn="10" regex="reply0 reply1">

This will tell Movable Type to run the search and replace on anything that appears inside the MTEntries container, and to run the regex called reply0 first and the one called reply1 second.

Now on to the comments tag. You need to make sure that there are no spaces between the end of <a href="..."> and <$MTEntryCommentCount$>. If you do have extra spaces in there, the regex won’t be able to find it. The entire comment count section should look like: <a href="<MTEntryLink>"><$MTEntryCommentCount$> replies</a>.

Now you’re done. Take a look at what a Movable Type template might look like with these changes.

<MTAddRegex name="reply0">s|>0 replies|>Reply|g</MTAddRegex> 
<MTAddRegex name="reply1">s|>1 replies|>1 reply|g</MTAddRegex> 
...
<MTEntries lastn="10" regex="reply0 reply1"> 
	<h1><$MTEntryTitle$></h1>
	<p><$MTEntryDate format="%B %e, %Y"$> - 
	<MTEntryIfAllowComments> 
		<a href="<MTEntryLink>"><$MTEntryCommentCount$> replies</a>
	</MTEntryIfAllowComments></p>
	<p><MTEntryBody></p>
</MTEntries> 

You can change the text that you use to describe your comments to anything you would like. For instance, if an entry has no comments and you want to display, "Why don’t you comment," you only need to change the line <MTAddRegex name="reply0">s|>0 replies|>Reply|g</MTAddRegex> to read <MTAddRegex name="reply0">s|>0 replies|>Why don’t you comment|g</MTAddRegex>