Awful Comment Moderation Workflow

One problem I have with Expression Engine's default control panel is that it isn't geared at all for efficient moderation of comments. To EE's credit, not a lot of spam comments make it through their filters anyway, but it takes way too many clicks to do the simplest comment deletion / opening. I actually have to open each comment in its own page first because you can't read the entire comment on the DISPLAY page. Then, I have to make two passes to first delete spam and then approve (open) the good ones. VERY TEDIOUS.

To fix the length of the comment preview, there is a SECRET CONFIGURATION VARIABLE that you can set in your config.php with this line:

$conf['view_comment_chars'] = '512';

This gives me ample text to figure out whether a comment is spam or not.

Modifying the Comment Moderation Control Panel

To find out what hooks I actually needed to change, I looked through cp.publish.php. There are a number of functions that output various bits of HTML. The function that views comments is called view_comments, and this is where I found the reference to view_comment_chars.

Recategorizing Existing Posts

There's no tool to do this, so diddling the tables directly is probably what I have to do. It will be incredibly tedious otherwise.

There is a database table called exp_category_posts that relates a particular entry_id with a category_id. Since an entry can have multiple categories, there is duplicate entry_id for each category it appears in.

The entries themselves are stored in exp_weblog_data. The text itself is stored in field_id_1, field_id_2 and field_id_3.

The categories are stored in exp_categories is combined with data from exp_category_fields and exp_category_field_data.