Movalog Plugins

Hierarchical Threads are the more traditional way of displaying comment threads. Here, "top level" comments (i.e. those without replies) are sorted by date. For each comment, replies to it are listed underneath and indented slightly. An example of hierarchical comment threads is shown in the screenshot below (from digg.com):

The following steps guide you through editing your templates to display hierarchical threads. These instructions have been tailored to match the default templates. If you have customized your comment templates, these are bound to be different so you will have to adapt the logic:

1. Open the Comments template module and search for this line

   <$MTInclude module="Comment Detail"$>
   

2. To change this into a hierarchical thread, we will need to look through the top level comments and for each top level comment, look through its replies (indenting each one as appropriate). Something like this works great:

   <MTIfCommentParent><MTElse> <!-- This conditional checks to make sure that this comment isn't a reply -->
      <!-- Display the top level comment -->
      <$MTInclude module="Comment Detail"$>
      <MTCommentReplies> <!-- Here we loop through the replies and for each reply -->
   
   
      <!-- if it is the first of that "level/depth", indent it -->
      <MTCommentsHeader><div style="margin-left: 20px;"></MTCommentsHeader>
   
   
      <!-- Display the comment -->
      <MTInclude module="Comment Detail">
   
   
      <!-- And loop through this container for replies of replies and so on -->    
      <MTCommentRepliesRecurse>
   
   
      <!-- If this reply is the last of that "level/depth" close the div we opened to indent -->   
      <MTCommentsFooter></div></MTCommentsFooter>
   
   
      </MTCommentReplies>
   </MTIfCommentParent>
   

3. Republish your templates. Your comments should now be in a hierarchical thread, for example: