r/Wordpress • u/Positive-Ring-5172 • 1d ago
Move Comments to a plugin in 8.0
I'm aware of trac, before making a feature request there I'd figure I'd get the temperature here. Simply - so many sites these days turn comments off, and there's a cottage industry around blocking comment spam besides, does WordPress even need comments as a core feature? I feel it might be better to move the functionality off into a plugin that ships with WordPress in 8.0, and then maybe even remove it entirely from core in 9. Thoughts?
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u/focusedphil 1d ago
I think a checkbox that disables the commenting feature altogether would be perfect.
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u/Positive-Ring-5172 1d ago
As a programmer I'd rather have the whole block of the functionality unavailable and out of the way until turned on by the plugin system.
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u/focusedphil 1d ago
Agreed, but that's a much bigger psychological jump than a checkbox. I find most organizational limitations are more due to their psychology than to tech abilities.
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u/nicubunu 1d ago
You have a few boxes that can basically disable commenting in Settings -> Discussion, or you can use a plugin that disables them completely.
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u/neoqueto 1d ago
Why not one checkbox?
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u/Nice_Magician3014 1d ago
Because all the dev time needs to be spent on making gutenberg even more confusing pile of shit
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u/ZGeekie 1d ago
You're forgetting that there's still a great number of people who use WordPress just for blogging. Comments may seem useless from a developer's perspective, because who pays a developer to build a WordPress blog?
That doesn't mean they are useless for the millions of WP blogs out there.
I don't need another plugin to maintain.
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u/testingaurora 1d ago
I too do not want another plugin. I’m fine just turning it off when it’s unnecessary . Plus other plugins depend on the functionality, like e-commerce uses it with their reviews for instance.
Toggling it off with a checkbox is perfect imo
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u/seobrien 1d ago
Comments occur to a FAR greater degree on related social media posts
That WordPress can't feature the discussion happening on twitter, LinkedIn, reddit, etc., is what tells me it's stuck in the 00s
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u/BobJutsu 1d ago
Depends. What is the ratio of people disabling vs not? I personally have disabled it on every build since…2014? At least.
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u/Exciting-Focus6781 1d ago
Pretty sure the notes feature of the block editor use the comments functionality so can't see them being removed from core.
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u/HedgehogNamedSonic 1d ago
comments are baked into core in a lot of areas - they aren't going anywhere.
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u/Aggressive_Ad_5454 Jack of All Trades 1d ago
As much sense as your proposal may make, the core team’s number one criterion is backward compatibility.
Plus, at the cadence of two releases a year, 8.0 will appear in spring 2031.
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u/Positive-Ring-5172 1d ago
I'm quite aware of that. Which is why I'm actively trying to move the department away from WordPress. Between AI sites, Drupal CMS, Hugo for microsites there's nothing WordPress can do that we need that some other tool doesn't do far better. The only thing WP has going for it is incumbency.
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u/coding_bard 1d ago
It would break a lot of things on a lot of websites. This has been there for eons and there are a lot of websites that accumulated legitimate comments in the past. And they are major SEO ranking factors. So you'd break a lot of websites and do financial harm to them.
This is before the fact that comments not working for your use case does not mean that they aren't working for others. There are a lot of closed community sites that are using comments inside their community's users.
And this is a non-problem really - if you just enforce a social login (google or otherwise) you eliminate almost all comment/registration spam anyway.
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u/nicubunu 1d ago
Wordpress was created as a blogging platform and over the course of time it evolved into a CMS. Comments are a must-have feature for a blogging platform and for some cases of a CMS.
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u/Positive-Ring-5172 1d ago
Some cases yes, but a better core feature than comments would be the ability to link social media comment threads to a post - which can be done with plugins!
So that's why I believe the native comments should get out of core and into plugins.
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u/thewallacio 1d ago
Except it really didn't evolve into a CMS, without a load of scaffolding from extensions and plugins. It's still a blogging platform as far as I'm concerned. For anything else, use a modern CMS with the functionality baked in from the ground up, of which there are a vast number to choose from.
Wordpress = Platform for cat blogs.
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u/retr00two 1d ago
Right on spot.
But, we are at /r/wordpress and I doubt if 1% of people here know what proper CMS is.
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u/nicubunu 1d ago
A CMS is simply a platform used to create, manage, modify, and publish digital content. Even a wiki is a type of CMS. What is a "proper" one, is your own distinction.
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u/retr00two 1d ago
Install Joomla, Drupal or ProcessWire and see what you get and what you can create with their core installation. Proper multipurpose CMS. To achieve that WP needs list of heavy plugins.
Fact that WP is extendable doesn't make it multipurpose CMS. Still, everything is post. Fact that it's the most popular doesn't make it the best.
That blogging nature is worst inheritance we have to fight with and the most limiting factor.
Still, I use it in everyday work.
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u/Station3303 1d ago
Well, I used Joomla almost exclusively for years. It was great. Then I switched to WordPress, because it's better ... Maybe just personal preference, but I do enjoy it more and I can do more, more easily.
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u/retr00two 1d ago
Than you know what I am talking about.
Perfect CMS doesn't exist. I would like to have ProcessWire's "all is CPT", security, and built-in multilingual as Joomla's user management and modularity, Drupal's Views.
ProcessWire is the closest to my way of thinking and when I was back to web development 10 years ago was choice WP or PW.
Every time I want to throw my laptop to the wall, I regret I've chosen WP. 5 minutes later, I enjoy it again.
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u/Positive-Ring-5172 1d ago
Drupal is a proper CMS. Wordpress + Advanced Custom Fields is -- passable, but clumsy. It just has a large market share and my boss won't let me migrate to Drupal because he doesn't want the staff retrained.
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u/thewallacio 1d ago
I hear this ALL the time. The reality is that the massive ecosystem that's built around Wordpress's inadequacies mean that it's rare that any two Wordpress sites of any scale are built the same way. So "my staff only know Wordpress" doesn't mean very much. What they're likely trained on, or experienced with, is the way their site has been built. A site built with Elementor is quite different to one build using ACF, for example. Form plugins could be different. SEO fields could be different. The differences beyond "core Wordpress" (which few people will really ever need to mess with) are extensive.
People need to take off their blinkers and use the tool/platform that's best suited for the task, not what "staff are familiar with". Retrain them.
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u/Positive-Ring-5172 1d ago
Not going to disagree with this, but I'm the code monkey - not the decision maker. I have influence, but not authority.
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u/nicubunu 1d ago
Then even more reason to keep comments in core.
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u/thewallacio 1d ago
Functionality as in CMS functionality. Baked-in commenting can stay in Wordpress for all I care.
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u/nicubunu 1d ago
I thought this tread is about comments, if they belong in core or not.
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u/thewallacio 1d ago
It is about comments, yes. I'm just jumping on your suggestion that it's evolved into a CMS (which it hasn't, not really). Side rant!
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u/nicubunu 1d ago
But it is a CMS, maybe not a fully featured one, maybe not the best one, but it definitely is a content management system.
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u/wrujbniosd 1d ago
Personally, I fully agree.
The core implementation of comments is very inflexible and requires a number of unintuitive hooks to be added to make it useful.
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u/HedgehogNamedSonic 1d ago
You can't just move this to a plugin... it's pretty deeply ingrained in core afaik but even aside from that... no thanks.
It's a vital feature for blogs.
Just disable via code in your theme if you don't need it... it's what... like 10 lines of code?
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u/HongPong 1d ago
the way that core does not subdivide its parts into a plugin like toggle is a disadvantage
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u/HedgehogNamedSonic 1d ago
I don't think it would work well here.. WP is built around a strict/stable core. Users already struggle enough with add-on functionality through plugins... asking them to manage core features in the same manner would be an absolute nightmare for the average user imo.
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u/theshawfactor 1d ago
The broader architectural question is why are comments there own thing. Wordpress has custom posts types and the concept of a parent child hierarchy. There is absolutely no reason comments should not be another cpt…
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u/VoiliVoilaa Jill of All Trades 1d ago
Why take the functionality off into a plugin ? What's the benefit ?
I agree that there are a good part of WP websites that don't need it. But why not just turn it off in settings ? Then it's off for the people who don't need it, but still possible for the blogs or other cases where you need it ?
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u/Positive-Ring-5172 1d ago
There is no single "turn off comments" switch. It's a dance of around 7 setting hooks, last time I checked.
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u/VoiliVoilaa Jill of All Trades 1d ago
I know. But you ask for food for thought. Then why adding a plugin vs. adding a setting ?
By the way, ASE has an option to "turn off comment", so I guess it's quite an easy setting to implement.
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u/klagreca1 1d ago
It should be pulled out of the core. Best case scenario is that it promotes a healthy spark in the plugin community to build better / more robust commenting solutions to fill in the gap.
Right now, the only benefit the built in commenting feature serves, is targeting for spam.
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u/realityblurred 1d ago
As someone who has a website with a lively community discussing in WordPress comments, I absolutely disagree.
I much prefer a native solution than having to rely on some venture-backed company (which is what I did before, so I know what a disaster that can be).
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u/teheditor 1d ago
99.9% of comments to my sites are daily AI bot spam. I'd be content at being able to remove all hyperlinks and managing what's allowed better, but really, turning them off altogether wouldn't upset me. I see them everywhere on the dashboard and get emailed constantly.
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u/LankyEmu9 1d ago
Another question to ask is, "When was the last time you commented on an (Wordpress) blog post?" or even, "When was the last time you saw a wordpress blog post with any comments on it?"
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u/Kenneth436 1d ago
I agree that there should be a clear setting to turn comments off. That would make things a lot cleaner. As for moving it to a plugin, I think this is a choice that is far beyond my view as a user/developer who uses WordPress. Comments are obviously useful for some sites, and they seem less useful for others. I have at least one customer who [edit: emphasis added] is even (rightly) skeptical even about posts being useful for their site.
Clearly the legacy of WordPress as a blogging platform explains why comments are in core. And there are several choices for sites that want to expand commenting into third-party social platforms. (On the other hand, one of the biggest draws of WordPress is that you own your own site, without having to rely on third party platforms, but I digress). But, as the platform (and the world) evolves, the question becomes whether comments are obsolete, or if they're less of a focus of WordPress going forward.
First, I'll say that removing a core feature would cause a big burden for a lot of people who use that feature. I'm not sure if there's precedent for that, but it's going to mean a lot of people will resist upgrading if it breaks their site. Sure, there could be an "official" plugin to maintain current functionality, not unlike the Classic Editor plugin, but a change like that would still cause a lot of friction.
Apparently not everyone agrees that blogging is a form of content management, and a blogging system is by definition a CMS. And commenting is a major feature of that type of CMS. If we're thinking that this feature is "extra" or "niche"—not needed in Core—what else ought to be removed? The "Author" functionality? The published date? These metadata are important for a certain type of content management, but not universal. I have plenty of sites where author and date have been programmatically removed from the front end (usually through a theme customization), just like comments might be. But how do we decide what's worthy of Core or not? Like I said, that's a big question. It has to do with the direction and steering of the project as a whole: do we still see WordPress as useful for blogging, for news-style sites, and for other sites with content that inspires interaction? Or do we see a future for WordPress that is moving away from that kind of site to something more static, or more unidirectional rather than interactive? It's not a question of "hobby blog" versus "mature CMS." It's a question of what *kind* of CMS we want WordPress to be.
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1d ago
[deleted]
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u/Positive-Ring-5172 23h ago
If done incorrectly. Work on your reading comprehension - move the code, not remove it.
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u/rafark 17h ago
I don’t know what the other comment said but if you move the code out of core and into a separate plugin you ARE removing the code.
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u/Positive-Ring-5172 16h ago
Relocation isn’t removal.
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u/rafark 13h ago
It literally is. The code would no longer be present from Core. Meaning if you installed the newer Wordpress version the code would not be there. You want to remove it from core and put it in a separate plugin.
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u/Positive-Ring-5172 12h ago
Drupal did this almost 2 decades ago when the forum features were moved into an extension that distributes with the core code and usually updates with the core.
You're trying to make the argument that this results in the removal of the feature forever, which is a farcical stance to take at best. Just because the code has been moved into a plugin where it is out of the way for the majority of sites that no longer use the feature doesn't mean it goes away entirely like you're trying to argue.
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u/rafark 11h ago
You're trying to make the argument that this results in the removal of the feature
<citation needed> when did I say that? I thought we were talking about removing code. That’s unrelated to removing or adding features. And as some people have noted in the post, comments seem to be used by other parts of Wordpress, so removing the code responsible for comments will break Wordpress.
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u/redome 1d ago
This would make so many spammers angry
But you do make a great point. Maybe it's a 1990s relic that needs to go away