Theming comments by the node's author

You want the comment style to be different for comments added by the author of a node — who's commenting on his own node. For example, you may want to highlight the node's author's comments, so that any visitor skimming through the comments will easily differentiate them from other comments.

Solution

  1. Edit comment.tpl.php to add a new class (let's say 'comment-by-author-of-post') that...

  2. you can style in your theme's style.css.

Your file comment.tpl.php may look like this before the edit (I am only providing a snippet of the template here):

<div class="comment<?php print ($comment->new) ? ' comment-new' : ''; print ' '. $status ?> clear-block">

If it does, then you will change the above snippet to that:

<div class="comment<?php print ($comment->new) ? ' comment-new' : ''; print ($comment->uid == $node->uid) ? ' comment-by-author-of-post' : ''; print ' '. $status ?> clear-block">

You could now add these two rules to your style.css file, for example:

/**
 * Comment styling rules
 */
.comment-by-author-of-post {
  border: 1px solid #ccc;
  background-color: #eee; 
}
/* reset to default values when previewing */
.preview .comment-by-author-of-post {
  border: none;
  background-color: transparent;
}

This will work in Drupal 5 as well. No, it won't. The $node object is not passed to the comment.tpl.php template. Read the comments below for the Drupal 5 recipe. This solution works only for PHPTemplate-powered themes. If your theme does not provide a template file for comments, copy the one from modules/comment/ to your theme folder, and edit it. And yes, the $node object is available in comment.tpl.php. It is the node the comment is attached to. Possible variations: special-style all comments authored by those who have the 'admin' role; special-style anonymously-submitted comments; etc.

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We used a Ternary Comparison Operator in our solution.

($a == 11) ? 'eleven' : 'not eleven'

The above code snippet returns a value. If $a equals 11, the return value is 'eleven'; otherwise, the return value is 'not eleven'. You can print the return value of a ternary comparison operator like so:

print ($a == 11) ? 'eleven' : 'not eleven';

Notice that I added both 'print' and a semicolon in the above snippet.

From php.net: “The expression (expr1) ? (expr2) : (expr3) evaluates to expr2 if expr1 evaluates to TRUE, and expr3 if expr1 evaluates to FALSE.” The ternary comparison operator is used a lot in Drupal templates. In our solution we printed ' comment-by-author-of-post' — in the class attribute of the comment div — if and only if the comment author was the same guy/girl as the author of the node the comment was attached to. And we printed nothing otherwise, ie: ''. (These '' are two SINGLE quotes.) We added this:

<?php print ($comment->uid == $node->uid) ? ' comment-by-author-of-post' : ''; ?>