CommentPress

commentpress

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And academics, unsurprisingly, often want to talk. After their first successful experiments with CommentPress, the Institute began receiving numerous requests from academics and other authors hoping to use the templates to publish their papers. They agreed in a few cases, using CommentPress to help Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg publish a HASTAC working paper, as well as installing the software as the engine behind MediaCommons’s ongoing video discussion feature, In Media Res.

This growing demand has spurred the Institute on to further development, working on compiling the various hacks and templates that, to this point, they’ve been tweaking manually into a releasable, documented, open-source theme easily installable and usable with any WordPress installation. CommentPress 0.9, a development release, was first made available to testers on 21 July 2007. The following day, I used my web hosting provider's one-click install function to load a new installation of WordPress, installed and set up the CommentPress theme, loaded in the text of this article, and did a bit of tinkering with formatting and the like, taking this article from a draft Word document to "published" (including, arguably, founding the publisher!) in under three hours. [note: further expansion of this section TK]

Because of the blog-based structure that the theme is built upon, and because of the multiple levels of commenting that it makes available, CommentPress can facilitate the publication and discussion of texts of a wide variety of lengths, and could with some additions to its front-page structure similarly allow for the publication of multiple texts, by individuals or groups of authors. CommentPress could, for instance, be used to structure an electronic journal as easily as a monograph, by linking together individual essays into “issues,” and issues into series. Moreover, the discussion spaces provided by CommentPress could be used by authors who want feedback while a text is in development or by authors who have completed a text and are seeking peer review. Texts published in CommentPress can be linked to one another, and in so doing can use WordPress’s “pingback” feature to create citation indexes. There remain a few other desirable avenues for the project’s future development as well, including true wiki-style versioning, such that the authors of CommentPress texts might continue revising and updating them, while maintaining the availability of the originally published versions within the text’s history. [note: a probable site for future expansion as well]