New Features in WoltLab Suite 3.1: Comment Improvements and User Profile Cover Images

There are three major improvements made to the commenting system that will be presented in this spotlight: editor support for both comments and responses to comments, new comments requiring approval before being visible to other users, and permalinks. Additionally, we will briefly introduce the new user profile cover photos.

Editor Support for Comments

   

(Writing a comment with the new editor and the resulting comment with an additional response)

The WYSIWYG editor has already been used for most user-created content in our software, with the most notable except being the comments. With version 3.1 however, users will now have the opportunity to format their comments and comment responses using the editor, the same way they would format a forum post, for example.

Comment Approval

Comments and comment responses are now fully covered by the approval system, known from other apps such as WoltLab Suite Forum that require new messages being approved by a moderator before being presented to other users. This behavior is controlled both by side-wide permissions per user group, and specific permission per comment type so that comments on users’ walls might not require approval before publication but comments on images and videos in WoltLab Suite Gallery do require it.

(A dynamically loaded comment above the pre-loaded comments, accessed through a direct link.)

Links in, for example, notifications for comments will now take you directly to the relevant comment instead of just the comment list. If the comment has already been loaded on the page, the browser will simply scroll to the linked comment. For an older comment that would normally not be pre-loaded already, the comment will be loaded dynamically and shown on top of the other comments. Permalinks, of course, do not only work for comments but are also supported for comment responses.

User Profile Cover Photos

   

(User profile with default cover photo on a smartphone and a desktop computer)

WoltLab Suite 3.1 introduces cover photos that are shown at the top of the user profile, enabling users to represent themselves while preserving your site's layout and general appearance. They are build to scale perfectly regardless of the type of device being used to access the user profile. Users that have not uploaded a cover photo yet are shown with a default image, which can be customized per style in order to match the overall color palette.

The cover photos can be globally disabled with a single switch, additionally there are dedicated user group permissions to view users’ cover photos and to upload cover photos for their own profile. Similar to the (temporary) blocking functionality for avatars and signatures, users can be restricted by temporarily blocking their cover photo.