Preview Of Ajax Edit Comments 4.0

I’ve finally had the chance to upgrade Ajax Edit Comments to 4.0 beta. This new version offers two new cool features. The first is that After The Deadline support is built right into the plugin. So regardless of whether site visitors are using the AtD FireFox extension, commenters will have the chance to spell and grammar check their comments before publishing. The other feature is the ability to pop open the commenting text area into a lightbox which has big text and provides ample space for writing the comment. This is especially useful for those that have a hard time reading the smaller text in the normal sized comment box. The only thing I’m not liking right now are the two icons that represent the features I discussed earlier. Here is how they make the comment form look which in my opinion, is a bit ugly.

This might me one of those things where the display of the icons and where they show up is dependent on the theme. I wonder if the icons can look like the QuickTag buttons which are pretty much the same as the buttons in the HTML editor. ABC could be replaced with Proofread and the expander could be replaced with expand or some other piece of text that signifies increasing the size of the comment box.

One of the other cool features of 4.0 is the drag and drop interface to configure how editing links are displayed. You can also quickly disable the links you won’t use to keep the list tidy.

You can find more information about 4.0 in this sneak peek post published on the AEC blog. 4.0 Beta is running on this website so please, feel free to edit your comments and play around with the options. If something breaks, notify me and I’ll pass it along to Ronald.

I think Ronald is undercharging for this plugin but if you want the same comment editing experience on your website, you can purchase it for only $10.00 a year for a single site. This gives you access to upgrades, automatic upgrading, and the support forums. Also, if you purchase the plugin through that link, I’ll receive a 50% kickback.

If you’d like to get a taste of what Ajax Edit comments has to offer, try version 3.1 which is available on the plugin repository although it probably won’t be for long. AEC 4.0 is expected to be released sometime in March pending a good beta cycle.