This idea expands on something originally done by MooKitty: Comment Backgrounds Hack. Kitty was directly inputting a background in wp-comments.php, but I realized that it made more sense to use an if/else statement and create two classes, comment-even and comment-odd, that could then be styled however the user wished. My end result is like so:
35 <?php if ($comments) { ?>
36 <ol id="commentlist">
37 <?php $i=0; foreach ($comments as $comment) { ?>
38 <li id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>" <?php if($i%2) {echo 'class="comment-even"';} else {echo 'class="comment-odd"';} $i++ ?>>
39 <?php comment_text() ?>
40 <p><cite><?php comment_type(); ?> <?php _e("by"); ?> <?php comment_author_l
ink() ?> — <?php comment_date() ?> @ <a href="#comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>"><?php c
omment_time() ?></a></cite> <?php edit_comment_link(__("Edit This"), ' |'); ?></p>
41 </li>
Using i=0 as a starting point for the counter allows the logic of if / 2 to work as one expects; the first comment is <li id=”comment-blahdiblah” class=”comment-even”>, etc.
I personally would suggest this as a code change for 1.3+.
[Thanks to Carthik's WordLog for pointing me to MooKitty's hack in the first place.]
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Isn’t there a mistake in the code on line 38?
?$gt;"Yes, Graham, there is. I’ll fix it. One has to encode < and > to get them to work properly.
My JavaScript version of this only gives you one class – “alternate” is the default – but you can still style the other rows. If you use a selector to get at the parent of the area you want striped, you can set a default, then define the style for the alternate class.
Easier: change the
foreachto readforeach ($comments as $num => $comment)then the second line in red toecho 'class="comment-' . ($num%2 ? 'odd' : 'even');