Comments in WordPress allow visitors the ability to leave thoughts and

feedback about the content on your site.

By default, comments are enabled for posts, but disabled for pages,

although you can enable comments for a page as well, on a page-per-page basis.

When someone posts a comment, they must by default

also include certain information like their name, email, and the comment.

It is possible to adjust these settings in the admin area as well and make additional

requirements like having someone register for your site in order to post a comment.

WordPress allows for comment moderation, so

you could decide whether comments go live immediately or

require someone to approve them before they show up on a site.

Let's practice now adding and moderating a comment.

To test posting a comment, I'm going to log out of my site,

come in and click on a post, and then scroll down to the comment area.

I'll go ahead and enter my information, And then a comment.

And then I'll go ahead and post this.

Notice that I could see my comment show up right away,

however, it has a little note that my comment is awaiting moderation.

Now if we log in to our site by simply adding wp-admin again,

we'll see notices in a few places such as in the toolbar at the top,

as well as in the Comment section here, or

even on the dashboard if we scroll down under Activity.

Let's come under Comments and we'll see that this is highlighted as red because

it needs to be moderated, and we have the option to approve it, reply to it,

quick edit, full edit, mark it as spam, or as trash.

Let's just go ahead and approve it to have it show up on the site,

then we can come back, look at our post, and see that this is here.

If we're already logged in, we can see that we don't have to

fill out all the same forms, it can just post our comment.

You'll also notice that an image appeared along with my name here.

The reason for this is because I have an image attached to that email

using a service called gravatar.com.

Gravatar.com is a WordPress related project that lets you tie a picture and

some basic information about yourself to an email address.

Most WordPress sites will look up whenever somebody has a Gravatar and

display that both in the admin area as well as on the front end of the site

in places like Author Posts or Comments.

If you haven't already set up a Gravatar account for

yourself, I suggest you head over gravatar.com and do so.

It will help enhance your WordPress experience.

We mention that there are also some settings for working with comments, and

if we come under Settings > Discussion, we can see a few of these.

Notice for example, that we can turn off posts on all new articles, but

this has to be overridden for individual ones that we've already posted.

If you edit a specific post or page,

you can also turn off comments on a per-post or per-page basis.

For example, if we come into a post, click on the "discussion" option,

and scroll down, we could see that we could un-check to allow comments, so

this will disable comments from this specific post.

We could also determine what information the user has to fill out,

as well as if they must be registered and logged in to comment.

Another common setting some people want to do for

security reasons is to have the moderator manually approve all comments.

We have some other custom options here for

helping to reduce spam and inappropriate language, and

then down below we have some settings that relate to Gravatars or avatars.

Notice that we could completely disable them for our site, or

determine what ratings of Gravatars are allowed on our site, and

what the default image should be if somebody doesn't have a Gravatar.

For example, some people like to set this to blank so

nothing will show up if they don't have a Gravatar account.

If you haven't tried creating test comments on your site,

I suggest you go ahead and try that now.

If you're working on a live server or if you have your local server set up

to send out email, you'll receive email notifications

in the admin email address that you used when creating your WordPress site.

These will let you link in directly into WordPress to moderate comments.

Go ahead now and try adding in a few comments on your site, as well as

playing around with different comment discussion settings to see what happens.