comment_form and comments_template and wp_list_comments in WordPress

I invested a good deal of time today customizing a comment form in a BuddyPress child theme.  My goals were to:

  1. Add a new field called, “Organization”
  2. Remove the “URL” field
  3. Remove the “Comment” text that appears above the corresponding textarea

The biggest learning for me was figuring out how comment_form, comments_template, and wp_list_comments fit together.

I learned a lot from Otto’s article on the subject, but that article didn’t address everything I needed to accomplish.  The following is what I did to accomplish the aforementioned goals.

In functions.php, I have the following:

// Change "Website" to "Organization" on the comment form.
add_filter('comment_form_default_fields','add_organization_to_comments');
function add_organization_to_comments($fields) {
    // New fields
    $fields['organization'] = '

'; $fields['author'] = '

' . ' ' . ( $req ? '*' : '' ) . '

'; $fields['email'] = ''; // Remove unwanted default fields unset($fields['url']); return $fields; } // save extra fields in database add_action( 'comment_post', 'save_comment' ); function save_comment($comment_id) { add_comment_meta( $comment_id, 'organization', esc_attr($_POST['organization']), true ); }

That’s it!

Tomorrow I will share how I displayed the “organization” field in the “comments” panel of the WordPress admin screen.

ttfn.

The Mighty Mo! Design Co.

2 Comments

  1. Otto on July 27, 2011 at 1:03 am

    Danger Will Robinson!

    This code leaves your site open to a XSS attack through the comments form. I highly recommend filtering the POSTed organization field.



  2. toby on August 8, 2011 at 3:42 am

    @Otto – Thanks for the heads-up there!

    All, I have incorporated Otto’s suggestion and added the esc_attr() function to the POSTs in the code above.



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