Tree/Reply enhancments

[jdmh]

Hi,

Firstly, congrats on JComments: nice work :-)

However, I can't currently use the Tree feature without some sort of pagination. Here are some suggestions for possible ways of improving the functionality:

1) Add the ability to restrict the number of levels (it looks like you are already planning this: http://www.joomlatune.com/forum/index.php/topic,2886.0.html).

2) Add the ability to show/hide replies. This might enable you to do a few things:

    a) Implement pagination (based on top level comments only)
    b) Maybe only fetch replies on demand, to minimise the amount of data needed at page load.

I haven't seen any system that does this exactly, but (if you are interested) JA Comments does have the ability to show/hide replies and CompoJoom does support pagination with replies.

Another (custom built) site that has an interesting approach is Animals Australia. They limit replies to one level and have the abiltiy to show/hide replies. My initial thought was that one level isn't enough, but looking at it in practice, it seems to work well. Here is a link to one of their pages with comments: http://www.animalsaustralia.org/features/rally-against-puppy-factories.php. However, I don't think they support pagination (not sure).

Having looked at other posts, I do know you are thinking about this issue. If you are at a point where you can share what you are planning, then I'd certainly be interested. Also, do you intend to support any of the Joomla versions after 1.5?

Thanks!

David

[smart]

You are right. I am thinking about improving performance and usability of tree-view for long time. And at this time I see only one solution - implementing loading of nested comments on user's demand.

As developer who has 12-years expirience with huge databases I count every SQL-query which is used for loading data.

Most extensions with tree-view pagination's support uses more than one SQL-query for building tree. Their algorithm is quite simple: load N comments of top-level and recursive load childs for each of them. So if user has 20 comments of top-level and each comment of second level  has some childs this algorithm will produce 1 + 20 = 21 queries. Seems this is not good, because we can have comments of 3,4 and deeper levels.

So in my opinion load on user's demand will be more easy and effective solution. But in this case we can get some issues with availability of comments for search engines because they could index only comments of top-level. This could be critical for some users.

Upcoming version will not contain any tree-view improvement because it already almost done, but it already has some changes which will help us in future. So I going to rework tree-view mode in next major version.