My Binary Blue Wordpress theme suite approaches Version 1.0. This evening I implemented a fully configurable and degradable AJAX enhanced paged comments feature - the most important task I still had on my must-have todo list

You can see the first early and fully functional version onsite. Just visit the posts or pages with more than ten comments, and you will be able to see it in action (e.g. directly on the theme’s main page, or on my recent post about the severe Safari security issue.

The basic idea has been borrowed (along with a few lines of code) from Keyvan’s Paged Comments Plugin, but the configurability through the theme’s options page and especially the complete AJAX functionality has been handcoded from scratch. Especially the prototype.js’s inability to handle responseXML cost several years of my future live, I fear

The idea for an AJAX enhanced version of paged comments came to my mind when I saw Keyvan’s AJAX paged comments demo, but unfortunately he didn’t make it to a published plugin yet, so I had to reverse engineer the facility in the commonly used clean room way (that means: look what’s going on and then rebuild the functions from scratch). I had to do this especially because I didn’t want a third AJAX library in the theme package, as a single one (prototype) is more than enough power.

The big adavantages of my solution should be clear: 1st it’s fully integrated into the theme and doesn’t require any plugin or manual puzzling in the HTML codes, and 2nd it degrades gracefully if no javascript resp. AJAX-enabled browser comes along. The flexible and convenient configurability just sits on top. Needless to stress, that it works in either modern browser that’s supported by the prototype package, right?

I’ll use the next few days to clean up the code, enhance performance of the complete theme here and there, I’ll rewrite the complete options page to get a cleaner and more convenient look-and-feel there, and if there’s time left enough up to the weekend, I’ll add some further new schemes for the suite. At the weekend I have planned to be ready to release the final version 1.0, so stay tuned, dear fans and friends

By the way: I’d really appreciate it if someone of you would contribute further localizations (still missing french, dutch and the scandinavian languages) and schemes. You can find everything that’s needed to translate the theme suite or to build up new schemes either directly in the zip package or on the download pages.