WordPress 2.7 has an awesome new thing: it turns the comments into hCards by default. An hCard is the microformat version of a vcard, which, with microformat extensions for your browser, you can then save the data of those commenters in your address book.
For instance, with the Safari microformats plugin, this looks like this:
If you use Firefox, you should check out Operator for the same functionality.
The only issue is, that the hCards don't contain email addresses. This is obviously good, as you wouldn't want to share everyone's email addresses on your blog, but as an admin or editor, you'd love for those to be included by default right?
Well, (you've guessed it) I've written a small plugin that does just that. If you're allowed to edit the current post, and thus the comments, the email addresses will be added to the comments section, invisibly. If you use the hCard though, they're there, so you can directly save them to your address book. The record will then contain name, website, email address and photo (gravatar in most cases) for the user. Cool huh?
Download the plugin here.
To answer a question I've made a quick screencast:
Just like visiting Grandma's house: I find a picture of me and I'm crossed out! Ha!
Anyway, I don't use hcards or vcards and I'm sure others don't also. What would be gained with the inclusion of the email addresses? Just an easier way to create a mailing list?
No, a quicker way to save the details of someone who commented on your blog to your address book for later reference :) I'll make a quick screencast of what it does.
I've made a quick screencast Henry, it's in the post now, hope this answers your question?
This will be helpful :)
Will install it today
Cool, let me know if it works for you. Do note that you have to use the 2.7 comment style to be able to use this.
Hello,
I just found your blog. I have just started using WordPress and so far great. Many of your posts are over my head but more of them would have been two weeks ago. Thank you for your "classes" on WordPress.
really interesting ... I'll try it :-D
The implementation of the hcards is not correct unfortunately. The link relationship should be fn url, but WP is splitting this into an fn class and adding url into the link itself. While some microformat readers may be able to understand this it just plain doesn't make sense. hcards are also supposed to be tied to a name. Therein lies a real problem because while some people will use a real name in comments, most use a nickname or partial name. This could be worked around by adding a field to the comments form for people to select from either real name or nickname and then the appropriate microformat could be applied.
Like the WAI-ARIA implementation in 2.7, the implementation of hcards seems to have been poorly thought out. I'm sorry to see that this is included in WP by default as a badly formed hcard is really worse than none at all.
@Lynn: Actually the WordPress hCard implementation is just fine. You wrote:
What about that doesn't make sense? Name and URL are two different attributes, so why should one assume that they are always combined? The reason for them being split like this is because not all commenters leave a URL. In that case, only the cite tag with the "fn" class will be present... there is no a tag. While it is slightly different, you can see a similar example on the microformats wiki.
This is actually not necessary... the hCard spec already handles it. Read the Implied "nickname" optimization section (as well as Implied "n" optimization above that). Depending on the value of the "fn" attribute, different things are implied. Could it be made more explicit so there is less ambiguity? Absolutely, but why clutter up the commenting interface with another input field for something so minor?
Just found your video on vimeo. Thanks for sharing this. I have to think about implementation in my blog.