Thread

I am finding it difficult to implement the ‘Highlight Author’s Comment’ using this guide from EE Wiki

http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Highlight_Author_Comments/

Is there any other easier way?

Here’s another way.

Michael, what if I choose not to use the ‘switch variable’ alternation of CSS? how will the code be different?

Rather than

<div {If author_id=="1"}class="author_comments"{if:else}class="{switch="comment_dark|comment_light"}"{/if}>

You’d remove the else part of the if statement and have:

<div{If author_id=="1"} class="author_comments"{/if}>

Looking again at the code, I used this on a one-person blog where the author_id was always known. If your authors will be variable, we’ll have to dig a bit deeper.

but that only display the author’s comment, how about the ‘else’ statement to display ‘the others’ non-author?

All comments will be displayed.  This will just apply an “author_comments” class to the authors comment.

I use this:

<div id="commentEntries">
{exp:comment:entries sort="asc" limit="20"}
<div class="commentData">{count} - {url_or_email_as_author} wrote on {comment_date format="%d-%m-%y at %g:%i:%s %a"}</div>
<div {If author_id=="1"} class="author_comment"{/if}>{comment}</div>
<div class="other_comment">{comment}</div>
{/exp:comment:entries}
</div>

But the page goes haywire.

Try simplifying the div structure by consolidating the class assignment into one if statement:

<div id="commentEntries">
    {exp:comment:entries sort="asc" limit="20"}
        <div class="commentData">
            {count} - {url_or_email_as_author} wrote on {comment_date format="%d-%m-%y at %g:%i:%s %a"}
        </div>
        <div{If author_id=="1"} class="author_comment"{if:else} class="other_comment"{/if}>
            {comment}
        </div>
    {/exp:comment:entries}
</div>

Still not working… page returns blank.

How would I know what my author_id is?

author_id is just a variable, so you can display it using

{author_id}

within the comment:entries tag.

how do i find out which author is associated with what id?

You can either just use the author and author_id variables in your template in a test fashion, or if you go to the View Members area of the Control Panel and rollover the member name, the ID is the last part of the URL.

Hey Mike,

I was playing with this and couldn’t get your code to work.

Finally figured it out: In your example (which I cut & pasted from your blog)

<div [If author_id=="1"]class="author_comments"[if:else]class="{switch="comment_dark|comment_light"}"[/if]>

The first “if” statement has a capitalized “If”. Once I changed it, it was all fine. So it should read:

<div [if author_id=="1"]class="author_comments"[if:else]class="{switch="comment_dark|comment_light"}"[/if]>

By the way - how would you have different author styles for different authors? I couldn’t see anything about multiple conditionals in the EEDocs (but must admit haven’t searched the forums yet!).

For example:

<div [if author_id=="1"]class="author_comments"[if author_id=="2"]class="author_comments2"[if:else]class="{switch="comment_dark|comment_light"}"[/if]>

</code></pre>

Cheers!

Robert

I worked it out by myself (where is the “proud smiley”?)

<div {if author_id=="1"}class="author_comments2"{/if} {if author_id=="11"}class="author_comments"{if:else}class="entry"{/if} >

This seems to work beautifully at the moment ...

Also @ Mike - my apologies I also see that the code on your blog has [] brackets rather than {}, which means any copy & paste wouldn’t have worked anyhow. The capitalized “if” could catch folks out though as it is hard to see the difference in the sans-serif font, so might be worth changing that.

Cheers,

Robert

Good catch on the capitalized if - I had had a note to change out the braces for brackets as I had published this before figuring out how to to prevent EE from parsing/rendering the example code.

I’ve updated the example - thanks!