In WordPress, other than the actual comment data (Author’s name, email , URL & comment text), comments also store the post (post ID) to which they are tied and parent comment (comment ID), if its a reply to another comment but in my experience, some day you might feel the need to untie the post & comment to which a particular comment is linked. Let me elaborate.
Comments assigned to wrong posts
I remember that it happened to me twice in my blogging journey that the comments were assigned to a wrong post and I caught then while I was replying to comments but at that time, I fixed them manually by editing in the database. Same issue was reported by other WordPress users too but I ignored the problem at that time and it never happened again> May be it was fixed or may be not, I am not sure. Some googling might help.
Unthreaded comments
And regarding the comments, comments were made like normal ones even if they were a reply to someone else comment but after the introduction of threaded comment feature, the newer ones become threaded and older one remain as it is.
Fixing them
So if you need to fix them for the above stated reason or whatever issue you may be facing, this plugin is easy to use instead of making changes in the database directly.
Plugin Usage
Install the plugin – Move WordPress Comments and open the posts or pages where you would like to fix comments.
As you can see the second comment is a reply to the earlier comment but it was posted before the thread comments feature was introduced.
At the bottom of every comment, you can see the following :
- Post ID – It shows the ID of the comment is linked to. Obviously it will be the current post/page ID and will be same for every comment on the page. Change this if you want to move comment to a different post or page.
- Parent Comment – It shows the comment ID of the parent comment. Zero value means it has no parent comment. Change this if you want to make it a reply to that comment.
- This is #xxx – This is the current comment ID if you want to take a note of it.
- Move button – It will save changes as per the values of Post and Parent Comment fields.
For our example, I entered the above comment’s ID into the Parent comment field of the next comment and press Move.
And this is how they will look now –
Very convenient but it could have been superb if there was ajax functionality built in with the plugin. That way we could quickly deal with a large number of comments. I will ask the author. Meanwhile feel free to ask any questions you may have.
