WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer, Second Edition

23

Managing Comments

One of the best ways to interact with your visitors is to allow them to leave comments on your site, and because WordPress was developed as blogging software, it has an extensive comments system. In this lesson, I show you how WordPress handles comments and the ways you can manage them.

ALLOW COMMENTS OR NOT?

WordPress offers two ways of deciding whether visitors will be able to leave comments: on a site-wide basis and on a per-item basis. I've mentioned both of these in earlier lessons on site administration and on creating posts and pages, but it's worth repeating here.

How you control your settings will depend on the kind of content you have on your site. If it's the kind that cries out for comments, such as a blog or a newspaper/magazine style site, then it makes sense to turn on comments so that they're activated by default each time you create new content. Then, you simply turn them off in those situations that don't call for comments (like your Privacy Policy page).

If your site is more informational — not talking about issues, controversies, opinions, and so on — you'll probably want comments off by default, turning them on only when you need them.

The important point is that you need to consider the purposes of your website and how the WordPress comment function might fit in with those purposes. Every site will be different and every area on your site needs to be considered separately as well.

ADMIN SETTINGS FOR COMMENTING

You can find the site-wide ...