WordPress 24-Hour Trainer, 3rd Edition

Lesson 23Managing 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. This lesson shows you how WordPress handles comments and the ways you can manage them.

Allow Comments?

WordPress offers two ways of deciding whether visitors can leave comments: on a sitewide basis and on a per-content basis. Both of these are mentioned in earlier lessons on site administration (Lesson 5, “Basic Admin Settings”) and on creating Posts and Pages (Lesson 9, “Advanced Post Functions”), but it's worth repeating here.

How you control your settings depends on the kind of content you have on your site. If it's the kind that cries out for comments, such as a personal blog or a newspaper/magazine style site, 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 (such as your Privacy Policy Page).

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

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

Admin Settings ...