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Unfortunately, the edits required to make this plugin work are fairly extensive. They don't, however, require any core edits, which means upgrading WordPress versions will not affect this plugin. I'll try to explain the edits the best I can.

1. Upload the plugin file "jal-edit-comments.php" to your plugins folder. This folder is located at /wp-contents/plugins/

2. Activate the plugin from your WordPress admin panel.

3. Here's where it gets tricky. We're going to need to make some changes to the comments.php file of your theme. This file is located in /wp-content/themes/YOUR THEME NAME*/comments.php

4. Before we make any edits, let's make a backup of comments.php . Copy the file and name it comments-backup.php . You should now have two comment files in your theme directory, one called comments-backup.php and one called comments.php .

NOTE: For people using the default theme, Kubrick, I've included a modified copy of the comments.php file. It contains all the edits needed to make the plugin work. If you're using a Kubrick-based theme, that file may also work for you.

1. For the rest of you, it'll require quite a bit of tweaking to get it right. Make the following edits to your comments.php file:

5a. First thing to do is add the link that users will click on to edit their comments. This will be added within the comment loop. The beginning of the comment loop looks like this:

And the end of the comment loop looks like:

Anything inbetween those two bits of code will be repeated for each comment. We need to add a tag that will create the link somewhere in this loop. The code is: . An example would be:

at |

This will output the comment date and time, and then the edit link. This function is a good replacement for WordPress's editcommentlink(). It uses the same structure and arguments.

5b. Now we need to account for three possible scenarios.

• Someone who is logged in and making a comment
• Someone who isn't logged in and making a comment
• Someone who is editing their comment (logged in or not doesn't matter)

In your file, the first 2 are already accounted for. We need to make room for the last one.

Find this: . It means there is someone logged in. The next line might be something like "

Logged in as....."

Here we go with a big edit. Delete this: And change it to:

5c. Now we need to edit the where users input their comments. Look for:

And replace it with:

5d. You're pretty much done! Now, we can just do a bit of beautification and cleanup.

We obviously don't want to have the "Leave a Reply" message as the header of the comment area if they're editing a comment. So change this:

Leave a Reply

To:

The above uses a ternary operator. Basically, if the someone is editing a comment, it will print "Edit your Comment", and if not it will print "Leave a Reply" . You could also use this technique for the submit button.

1. Break out a bottle of champagne. You just finished the installation of Edit Comments. Enjoy!