Blog 4 Umbraco 2.0.10 – Comment moderation

Today I continued the work on the comments part of the blog (after storing the comments in a seperate table and tackling comment spam with Akismet). I added a new control to the content dashboard where it will be possible to moderate the comments.

Dashboard ?

The (usually) blank right side of umbraco is called "The Dashboard". This area is configurable by adding references to the file called "/config/dashboard.config".

So I created a new usercontrol wich I added to the content dashboard by added this snippet to the config/dashboard.config

<section>
      <areas>
        <area>content</area>
      </areas>
      <tab caption="Comments">
        <control>/usercontrols/Blog4Umbraco/CommentModeration.ascx</control>
      </tab>
</section>

With this comment moderation usercontrol I simply list all the comments and make it possible to delete and mark as spam/ham , in case Akismet didn't make the right conclusion.

The content dasboard now has a comments tab where you can view all/only approved/only spam comments (with gravatar, author name, email, website, comment, timestamp and the page it was posted on). For each comment it is possible to delete. If the comment was seen as spam it has a different background color and it's possible to mark the comment as ham (this will send feedback back to Askimet and approve the comment so it displays on the frontend). If the comment wasn't seen as spam it's also possible to mark it as spam (wich will also send feedback back to Askimet and it will mark to comment as spam and remove it from the frontend).

The code for the usercontrol basicly just uses the datalayer to fetch all comments and then this is binded to a repeater.

private void BindData()
        {
            IRecordsReader rr = SqlHelper.ExecuteReader(
                string.Format(
                "select * from comment {0} order by created desc", Filter));

            rptComments.DataSource = rr;
            rptComments.DataBind();
        }

 

This is the first version of the comment moderation control, so there might be other features added in the next days.