Expandable Dashboard Recent Comments Plugin

By default, the ‘Comments’ section of the ‘Activity’ admin dashboard widget only shows an excerpt for the comments, truncating the content of the comments to the first 20 words while at the same time stripping out all markup.

This plugin adds a link at the end of the comment actions row (the links for the comment that become visible under the comment when you hover over the comment). The “Show more” link, when clicked, will replace the excerpt with the full comment. The full comment will include all markup, including originally utilized markup and changes applied via filters, plugins, etc (such as shortcode expansion, smilies, paragraphing, etc). The full comment can be switched back to the excerpt by clicking the “Show less” link (which replaces the “Show more” link when the comment is expanded).

“In-place expansion” refers to the ability to click the link to see the full comment and it will be presented in place of the excerpt without requiring a page reload or navigation.

NOTE: This plugin only works for users who have JavaScript enabled.

Links: Plugin Homepage | Plugin Directory Page | GitHub | Author Homepage

Hooks

The plugin exposes one filter for hooking. Such code should ideally be put into a mu-plugin or site-specific plugin (which is beyond the scope of this readme to explain).

c2c_expandable_dashboard_recent_comments_start_expanded (filter)

The ‘c2c_expandable_dashboard_recent_comments_start_expanded’ hook allows you to configure the ‘Recent Comments’ admin dashboard widget initially display all comments in their expanded state (i.e. not excerpted).

Arguments:

• $default (boolean): The default state, which is ‘false’ (therefore comments are initially shown excerpted)
• $comment (object) : The comment object being displayed

Example:

// Initially show dashboard comments fully expanded add_filter( 'c2c_expandable_dashboard_recent_comments_start_expanded', '__return_true' ); 

1. Install via the built-in WordPress plugin installer. Or download and unzip expandable-dashboard-recent-comments.zip inside the plugins directory for your site (typically wp-content/plugins/)
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ admin menu in WordPress
3. Visit the admin dashboard and check out the ‘Comments’ section of the ‘Activity’ widget (assuming you have recent comments and that one or more of them have been automatically excerpted)

1. 

   A screenshot of the 'Recent Comments' admin dashboard widget with the plugin active, showing comments that have been truncated/excerpted by WordPress (the 2nd and 4th listed) and full, short comments. The third comment has the mouse over it (though the cursor doesn't appear in the screenshot) so you can see the action links, including the "Show more" link. Note, also, the 'Expand All' and 'Collapse All' links added to the bottom of the widget.

2. 

   A screenshot of the 'Recent Comments' admin dashboard page with the plugin active, now showing the second excerpted comment (the third comment in the list) fully in-place expanded and with markup and formatting applied.

2.8.2 (2021-09-16)

• Change: Note compatibility through WP 5.8+
• Unit tests:
  • Change: Restructure unit test directories
    • Change: Move phpunit/ into tests/
    • Change: Move phpunit/bin into tests/
  • Change: Remove ‘test-‘ prefix from unit test file
  • Change: In bootstrap, store path to plugin file constant
  • Change: In bootstrap, add backcompat for PHPUnit pre-v6.0

2.8.1 (2021-04-10)

• Change: Escape text used in markup attributes (hardening)
• Change: Note compatibility through WP 5.7+
• Change: Update copyright date (2021)

2.8 (2020-08-21)

Highlights:

• This minor update features a rewrite of the JavaScript to use vanilla JS instead of jQuery, improves handling of some unlikely edgecase situations, restructures the unit test file structure, and notes compatibility through WP 5.5+.

Details:

• Change: Rewrite JavaScript into vanilla JS and away from using jQuery
• Change: Prevent edgecase issues with get_comment_class()
  • Verify global comment is an actual comment object before use
  • Return an empty string if no comment ID is known
• Fix: Remove stray double-quote from comment row markup
• Change: Restructure unit test file structure
  • New: Create new subdirectory phpunit/ to house all files related to unit testing
  • Change: Move bin/ to phpunit/bin/
  • Change: Move tests/bootstrap.php to phpunit/
  • Change: Move tests/ to phpunit/tests/
  • Change: Rename phpunit.xml to phpunit.xml.dist per best practices
• Unit tests:
  • New: Add unit tests for comment_row_action(), enqueue_admin_css(), enqueue_admin_js(), get_comment_class(), register_styles()
  • New: Add another unit test for c2c_expandable_dashboard_recent_comments_start_expanded filter
  • Change: Add comment separators to document test groupings
  • Change: Tweak code spacing
• Change: Note compatibility through WP 5.5+
• Change: Change get_comments_class() from private to protected to facilitate unit testing
• Change: Supplement FAQ with info regarding behavior when JS is disabled
• Change: Fix some typos in readme.txt

Full changelog is available in CHANGELOG.md.