Comments on: Hack: Wordpress cancel reply button

By: daniel

daniel — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:35:13 +0000

There’s actually a good reason for the cancel button to not be a button, see this Coding Horror post:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/03/the-opposite-of-fitts-law.html

Basically the reason might be that they don’t want you hitting the ‘cancel’ button by mistake, when you’re looking to hit a similarly styled ’submit’ or ‘ok’ button.

By: Felix

Felix — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:13:14 +0000

The normal link for cancel makes sense to denote that this is not the primary action. The latter in turn has a real button. So from a usability and persuasive design standpoint, everything had been well.

By: fool

fool — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:22:02 +0000

Here’s a reason to do it the way WP does: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/03/the-opposite-of-fitts-law.html

Nice that you can change it if you don’t like it of course, thanks for figuring out that hack. Could do the same thing to make it a button but move it out of the way or style it a bit differently or whatever.

You have to decide about the role and importance of cancel for a particular site and commenting community I guess. It’s always worth thinking about whether a post you’re making is a good contribution and cancelling it if not.

By: creative

creative — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:34:26 +0000

Thanks! I was just coming back here to comment that I figured it out and saw your post. And you filled in the blanks for me too. I found the cancel_comment_reply_link() and moved into the next to the Submit button. Now it all looks fantastic! I don’t understand what made the WP team lay this form out so oddly to begin with. Anyway, your code puts order back into the WP Comments GUI!

Thanks for pointing out a better way of labeling the button. Gettin’ it out of the functions.php file right now.

Thanks again

By: chromakode

chromakode — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:08:52 +0000

Check the location of the call to cancel_comment_reply_link() in your comments.php file. I moved it to be inside a paragraph with the submit button, like this:

>
   name="submit" type="submit" id="submit" tabindex="5">
     echo attribute_escape(__('Submit Comment')); ?>
  >
   cancel_comment_reply_link('Cancel') ?>
>

You might also consider setting the label for the button as a parameter here, rather than hard-coding it into your functions.php.

By: creative

creative — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:32:53 +0000

BTW… What code did you use to get the Cancel button down next to the Submit Comment button? My button still hangs under the form title where the link used to be. Did you use CSS?

Any help would be appreciated.

By: creative

creative — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:22:48 +0000

Awesome! It works like a charm! Hey…thanks for fixing this so fast!

Keep up the excellent work!

By: chromakode

chromakode — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:34:11 +0000

Oops! You are correct. There was something missing. The second line of cancel_comment_reply_button originally read:

$button = '

Note that this doesn’t make use of the $style variable that was set on the first line. The $style variable contains CSS that hides the button if it is not a comment reply — the behavior you were missing!

I checked my functions.php file, and sure enough, here was the correct line:

$button = '

Good eye. Thanks for pointing this out. I’ve amended the original post.

By: creative

creative — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:53:37 +0000

Thanks for posting this. I tried it out on my template (editing the Default Kubrick in 2.8.4) and it worked. I hacked your code further to change the button label name:

return $button . $text= ‘Cancel Comment’ . ”;

The only glitch with this code is that the button appears in a post all the time. It only disappears when you click on a threaded reply and then cancel.

I’m not a PHP or WP expert but somewhere there’s something missing in the code. The Cancel button should only appear when replying to a threaded comment right?

Anyway, great work!