5 Essential WordPress Comment Plugins

After going through wordpress plugin basics and plugins which help you uploading/managing other plugins, its time to move to something really important. I don’t know what is your priority but as a blogger I care most about my readers. Its more important than SEO or other traffic tactics to me which I will discuss in subsequent posts in the series.

So here I am listing plugins which will take your wordpress blogs’ commenting system to the next level, and thus will make it easy for you and your visitors to collaborate.

1. Subscribe to comments plugin

This plugin will add a subscription option to comment form on your blog posts. When a user checks this option, he will be automatically informed via email whenever you or someone else post a reply or other comments on that post.

Also that email sent will contain option to unsubscribe as well as manage subscription for your blog posts.

May not sound important to a blogger this plugin attracts visitor as they don’t have to monitor you blog posts manually. As a reader, when I visit a blog, if I find this subscription option there, I most likely to comment on that blog.

This plugin is in fact so great that next wordpress version is most likely to incorporate in it.

Link: Subscribe to Comments by Mark Jaquith

2. Comment Editing Feature Plugin

This plugin allow your users to edit comment post by them. Many times, readers of this blog requested this feature here and so I am adding it today.

You can control time period till editing option will be open. I think this is really nice plugins which can help comments to be more meaningful.

Link: WP Ajax Edit Comments by Ronald Huereca

3. WordPress Threaded Comments

This plugins is good for posts which invites lots of comments. This let your visitors reply to a particular comment like it happens on forums.

I used this plugin in past but I don’t use it anymore because sometimes it makes it hard to find recent comment on a post which have hundreds of comments.

Link: WordPress Threaded Comments by ????

4. Better comment manager

If you really care about answering comments on your blog, then this will make this task easy.

It will add a tab “Better comment manager” to your blogs dashboard which allow you to replay to all your comments on different posts from a single page. It will also add option for threaded reply in case you are using Threaded Comments plugins as described above.

Link: Better comment manager by Keith Dsouza

5. Paged Comments

This plugin is good for posts which attracts hundreds of comments. Those comment make your post page so long that if you have something important in footer, visitor needs to scroll a lot for that.

Link: Paged Comments by Keyvan Minoukadeh

Apart form these there are softwares which notifies you whenever a comment is posted on your blog, But they all are so primitive and make use of some sort of hacks or polling techniques which increases load on your blog. So I am waiting for WordPress 2.7 which will have comments API. With comments API one can really expect some nice desktop softwares to mange comments.

Thats all for the day! Tomorrow I will post about visitor centric plugins tomorrow. 🙂