A Short Story

I tried a new plugin, Better Comments Manager by Keith Dsouza and I couldn’t get it to work. At ALL… on either this Blog or on My Computer Back in Service.

So, I checked to make sure that the file was downloaded properly and unzipped correctly. I created a new folder on the server and Re-Uploaded all the files that were included in the original download.

It still wouldn’t work for me. It seems to work for most others, if comments on his post are any indication. There were some exceptions of course, but only a couple.

I’m not sure why, maybe it was intuition, but I logged into one of the Blogs using FireFox and tried it again. It worked with no problems. So, I tried it on this Blog using FireFox and it worked perfectly. But it still wouldn’t work when I used Internet Explorer.

I have written before about how things work differently on various Browsers and the importance of CrossChecking. It seems that Plugins are no different in dealing with different browsers.

The Solution

I sent an eMail off to Keith to let him know about the problems I was having using IE7 and explained politely that there are a lot of IE users out there and that they may not be able to use his plugin as well. Therefore, he was probably not reaching a big portion of his intended end users.

Within 2 days I got a return eMail from Keith with a link to a new download that contained all the necessary fixes. I am quite sure he didn’t write the fix just for me, but it does show how professional he is when it comes to his work. He made sure that something he wrote, that has his name on it, performs at or above the expectations of the end user.

Epilogue

Better Comments Manager works as promised.

Responding to comments individually or en mass is simplified through the Admin Page of your WordPress Blog (In IE And FF).

I would highly recommend it to anyone who has any comments to answer, especially if you have numerous comments on a particular post. There is a feature included that will show you ALL the comments on a post so you can respond accordingly.

Keith is just starting to write some plugins for WordPress after changing over from the Joomla platform. (He wrote quite a few add-ons for them too).

If he shows as much dedication to his projects in the future as he has for BCM, then you can be assured that his plugins, or anything else he shares, will work as promised.