Regular[1] readers will recall that I’ve been having a bit of bother with the smilies on the comment form lately. For a while it seemed I had a choice between the nicely interactive comments with threaded replies and having working smilies[2]. Then I found the seriously fancy Ajaxed WordPress plugin, which looked like it might do the job, and actually work with the kind of comment form found with modern WordPress themes. And it did, sort of. You could actually click to insert smilies, but there was a slight problem in that the actual smilies didn’t show up on the form, just their alt text (and I understand, the odd red X for people using bizarre and primitive browsers[3]).

So, this morning, I decided to see if I could fix this. I delved into the plugin’s files, and found that it was so nicely organised into subfolders for its various bits, that finding what I was after was easy. In a file called quicktags.php, I found the bit where it was inserting the path to the smilies. Now it was using some fancy code to try to find the folder where the smilies live, and for reasons beyond my limited code comprehension, this didn’t work. I went for the quick and dirty fix of replacing that code with a single line pointing at the actual location of my smilies. I saved the file and uploaded it.

And it worked! Yay, etc.

Now that bit’s working, I’ll fiddle with some more of the plugin’s options…

[1] And irregular ones[4]
[2] This is because most smiley plugins depend on the text box having a standard name, which it won’t have in a theme that does the whole threaded comments thingy.
[3] Hi AJ
[4] Hi Twisty