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I'm new to Joomla and am not that knowledgeable about code but I've installed your extension to my site and it appears to work. I have a few questions:
- how do I apply the comments to specific articles, right now it asks for comments on all articles. I want to have just one area of my site that has interactivity
- when I was configuring the comments plugin it asked for the guest email - I just made one up to move along but why would it want this and will it matter that I just made one up

I'm curious, did you read instructions on the Homepage, or did you succeed (at least, partially) without reading them  ???

Currently yvComment allows you to select 'interactive area' by Sections (SectionIDs).
E.g. you want to have comments for the 'News' section only.
1. (in the backend) you should go to the menu->'Content'->'Section Manager', see the list of sections and look up ID of the 'News' Section there: it's 1.
2.  In the "List of Sections IDs which may, or may not, contain comments. e.g.: 1, 22, 15 (empty - All)" parameter of yvComment you write '1' and saves yvComment's settings.
3. You've done: now users can add comments to the Articles of the 'News' Section only. Please note, that old comments are not deleted automatically, even if you disabled to add comments to the corresponding sections.

Did you get me?


Please read 2. Preparing for configuration, point 2. In other words, every Article (and Comment is a special Article) needs to have an Author among registered users of Joomla! site. But guests are not 'registered users', so yvComment needs to know, what (virtual) user will be mentioned as an other of guest's comments.

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Text of all my messages is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

I read the directions but as usual I'm in a hurry and missed important points, in fact I went back and figured out how to specify comments to ID of Sections. (I sometimes am too quick to post for help). My question re guest, you don't address the fact that when you create users you must add an email address for them- a guest account shouldn't have a specific email???
Do you have instructions re changing the CSS styles ??
Unlike a Blog there is no area (side module) for the public to see an index or archive of comments by date, it could get unmanageable/if the article that has comments is left on the site for a while.
I like the simplicity of being able to add comments to certain parts of my site.
Thank you for your quick response.

Yuri, this looks like a GREAT extension!

I have installed it but not yet enabled it because of two questions I have:

1) Is there a way to uninstall it if it turns out to not be what I need?
2) If I use content table as default for database, and find out I don't like it, is there a way to repair the changes made to the tables?

Thanks!

Yours truly,
Richard in Norway

Of cause, yes. yvComment doesn't patch Joomla!: it follows the rules of any other extension, including ability to be fully uninstalled automatically.

There is no any changes to the structure of Joomla!'s content table. yvComment just adds new records to the table (one record is one comment), it uses existing fields of the table in natural way. So, there would be nothing "to repare". You may delete comments using Joomla's 'Article manager' like any other content.

_________________
Text of all my messages is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

You may use any email: yvComment doesn't use this email in any way.

No, just create your copy of yvComment's CSS in your template's CSS and play with it like with any other CSS...

1. You may use any module, that was designed to list Articles, e.g. exisiting "Latest News" may act as "Latest comments" (see detailes on the Homepage). Just filter it to show Section, that is assigned for Comments.
2. You may create special menu item of 'List of Comments' type to see all comments in one place, paginated.
3. There is List of Comments in the Backend...

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Text of all my messages is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Thanks for answering my questions. I tried to enable it now but get the following error:



Any idea what I did wrong?

Does this mean I can't allow guests to comment for some reason?

This means, that you mentioned 'Guest' as Username of the user, but there is no user (see User manager) with such Username (maybe, even case is important).
If you followed my instructions on the Homepage, you had to create User with 'guest' Username and set 'Username of Guest' parameter of yvComment to 'guest' also...

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Text of all my messages is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Wow, I read through your documentation twice but somehow I missed that part! Sorry!

Thanks for the quick support though! I may have a few questions soon as I am already wondering why there are no "comments" links on any of my articles. I expect to see them on the front page - even if there are no comments (just to show that you *can* comment on articles).

Cheers!

Ok, I just created this "guest" user, but I don't like doing that as I had to provide an e-mail, password and even site access for the account (with the lowest level being "registered - which guests are not!). So I'm not sure that's a great thing but hopefully it won't mean anything other than that they can post comments?

Ok, I see it is working now.

I have issues with the way it links to comments from the news article.

It is pretty common practice to show a link at the top of an article (from the front page view) that says "comments (0)" and the amount of comments.

Is that not possible with this system?

Which template do I need to edit to move the link to the top of the article instead of after the "read more" link? And is there any way to write the amount of comments in the link? Or is that an extra query?

is there a way to add new fields to the component? for instance  phone and affiliation?

Yes, but of cause, if someone will figure out password of the 'guest user', he will have real rights of that user in Joomla!.


From the Homepage:

After you created a copy of this template, you may do whatever you want  :)
To place 'Comments(n)' link to the top of the article, you have to insert that link to the beginning of the article->text attribute...


You mean 'number of comments'? - It's there, but yvComment doesn't show Comments(0) (it shows 'Add your comment instead'), only Comments(1)... Try to add comments and see.

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Text of all my messages is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Wow, Yuri, you're the man!

I can't believe how well thought out this is. All of my questions were answered and you had already taken them into account before I even asked them!

I am very impressed with you and your support.

Thanks so much for everything. I am certainly giving you top score in the extensions review.

I must admit I didn't quite grasp the template change bit but I will work with it a bit and see if I can't figure it out.

Cheers!

Sorry for my ignorance but I am just wondering about the Guest user with Author rights. Does this have any security implications? Does one have to prevent visitors from actually submitting articles besides comments? Does a visitor get access to content for registered users after submitting a comment - and if not in the normal case could a hacker exploit this? Is it really necessary or optimal for data from a form to be put into the database that the submission is considered to be from an author (ie registered user plus article submission rights)?

1. 'Guest user with Author rights' means that yvComment (and not the visitor) use these rights to post comments on behalf of visitors (guests), who themselves don't have any rights to add/change content. Visitor is not logged on the site, so he can't do anything in the name of 'Guest user'.
'Author' is the least level of access in Joomla!, that is legal to post content to the site.

2. Adding the 'Guest user' is necessary for data consistency in the Content table of Joomla!'s database. Comments are considered to be special type of content (like general articles, news, quotes etc.), so every comment has to have reference (Author ID: 'created_by' field) to the list of registered users.
If yvComment wouldn't use 'Guest user' for this reference, the reference will be blank, and the comment will be sort of 'violating data integrity'...

3. As a result, this approach enables to manage comments, made by guests, using any Joomla! tools. E.g. you may log in the frontend as 'Publisher' or 'Admin' and edit comment, made by guest, just like you may edit any other Article, using Joomla!'s configured editor. If the Article (Comment in this case) doesn't have 'created_by' reference to the list of registered users, Joomla! creates this reference, putting current user's id there. So user, who edited the comment, becomes it's Author 

4. So, using 'Guest user' in fact helps control and remember, who's submitting Content to the site. Now Admin, looking in the 'Article manager', knows, that all 'Articles' with 'Guest user' as an Author, are Articles (comments), that where submitted through yvComment by some unregistered visitor.

5. Exploiting 'Guest user' is not easier as any other user's account. Just make sure you give him password, that nobody knows (yvComment doesn't use and doesn't get it...)

Did I answer your question?

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Text of all my messages is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Thank you, I'll try not to disappoint you 

This is quite foggy subject, that in fact requires some knowledge of programming. Nobody to date told me, that he tried this (I did: just added some 'bla-bla-bla' to the custom template to see, that it works  )

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Text of all my messages is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Thanks for the explanations Yuri, and I am trying to understand it all. Let me summarise my understanding to see if you can elaborate or correct me.

a. Any extension can be made to talk to the database without needing a user so there must be a particular reason for yvComment (btw clever name) to do so as a user.

b. I am not sure what special types of content are, but it seems the particular objective is to enable comments to be managed like an article.

c. I am still not sure why you want comments to be dealt with like articles but it seems this is to have corresponding sections and categories, enable editing by (super)admins, and have other features such as the use of some standard modules. But presumably that again could be achieved with a simple database table and without an author-level user. Am I right to think that part of the reason is also that in this way you did not need to make a backend comment editor?

d. As comments are treated like articles, they are put in sections and categories. As you wrote in the instructions: "To distinguish Comments (of Articles) from Articles themselves (and from other content, e.g. News etc.), you have to create Section and Category (in this Section) specially for comments (later you will select them in yvComment Plugin parameters). These Section and Category shouldn't be used for other content (for Articles) to avoid confusion. Articles (that are commented by yvComment) may belong to ANY section and category, except above mentioned." I am still sipping my morning coffee but it seems to me that by making a separate set of section & category the correspondence is lost with the section and category of the article commented upon.

e. To achieve that comments are treated like articles, a comment must be made by a user, and author is the lowest level user that can do so. You said that it is not the visitor but yvComment which acts as the 'Guest' user with Author access level. I take it that this means that therefore there should not be any particular security implication and that the process acting as 'Guest' is completely server side.

f. However this means that there will be an article item in the articles manager for each comment posted. If so I would have preferred keeping my articles manager for articles and having a separate manager for comments.
Looking into your extensive instructions I see that there is a "Use Content Table" option. Copying from your guide: "By default, yvComment uses the same storage (database table) to store comments, where Articles are stored. Change "Use Content Table" option to "No"  (I don't recommend this!), if you want to have your comments in their own database table. Note, that in this case, you will lose some interesting features (read below...)."
If my understanding is correct with this option I could choose whether or not to have comments show up in my article manager.

g. These features as I understand it are the ability to edit comments like articles. That is, doing so in the front end, because when an article is edited in the backend the authorship will change to the user who edited the comment.

h. So, basically, if I want to use the advantages of comments being dealt with as submitted by an author, I will have to accept that my article manager will be filled up with comments. I can filter the article manager view to see only comments, but there is no way to filter out comments and see only articles unless the only two authors I have are the guest author and one superadmin. If I don't want that, then I should not make use of the "Use Content Table" option.

j. Since there is no point in editing comments from the backend anyway due to the change of user issue, there also does not seem to be any point in having comments show up in the article manager.
So I perhaps should not make use of the "Use Content Table" option, but then I will not have the benefit of other features. I am not sure exactly which features these are, but I take it they include the use of existing modules. Moreover, if I understood your manual right then I will not be able to edit comments which would be a drawback for a comments extension.

k. I must have misunderstood something somewhere, but the bottom line seems to be that either in my articles manager I will have to scout for articles in a possibly list of comments or I wil not be able to edit comments or use other features that make yvComment a fully functional extension.

l. If this is so, but I stand to be corrected, I think you should try very hard to convince the core team to enable exclusion filtering in the articles manager because that would solve it, or you could try and offer a patch doing this to allow filtering out comments.

There are many ways that lead to Rome so I am not trying to see if you went about it the right way, but you'll agree that you did something out of the ordinary. Perhaps it is actually a very clever way but I am just trying to see if the way you went about it is right for me. I know some of my questions might be answered if I tried the extension, but really I am just trying to understand the practical and security implications first.

BTW, does your uninstaller remove not only files but also database entries, i.e. a full cleanup? Could I switch from "Use Content Table" and back?

'to do as a user' is a logical matter. Technically, yvComment doesn't use 'Guest user account'...

Main reason for this is 'logical consistency of architecture'... yvComment should be integral part of Joomla! and not something, 'sitting near'...

I would say, 'be as close to articles as you can and you will benefit from everything done for articles'  :)
this includes 'Management', Editors, Modules, Content plugins...
'Extending' articles and not duplicating it gives yvComment's user the ability to leverage everything, that is and will be done by the whole Joomla! community and not by yvComment's developer only  8)

No, there IS backend comment manager (list)/editor. It is in the menu->Components->yvComment->List of Comments (see more details here). The same list may be created in the frontent as Menu Item.

No, the connection is still there. Look:
- yvComment even has parameter "List of Sections IDs which may, or may not, contain comments. e.g.: 1, 22, 15 (empty - All)" - this parameter hold SectionIDs of commented Articles!

Yes, whole logic, that acts like 'Guest user' is completely on the server.

Yes.

Not exactly so. If author is 'Guest user' and some admin edits the comment in Article manager, the authorship remain the same, but "due to the known bug in Joomla! core (see bug No. 8709 and  Topic: Extending metadata of Articles (Poor implementation of content metadata saving)) if you edit existing Comment from the backend using Joomla!'s "Article Manager", some data from the comment (guest's link to his site and email) would be erased. So don't use "Article Manager" in the backend to edit comments, made by guests, in conjunction with this option. We're lucky, that this bug doesn't exist for editing Comment with Joomla!'s Editor from frontend!".

Yes.

As I wrote above: you may edit/delete comments both from frontend and backend using yvComment's editor.

Of cause, not using content table, you loose some features. And visa versa: using it, you may use extensions, that know nothing about yvComment, but still work with (for) it!

Maybe you right. And I think, that this patch will be VERY simple (one 'Exclude' checkbox and processing it while building SQL query...) 

No, uninstaller doesn't delete data. You have to do it yourself. But this is very easy with Article manager: filer comments, select all, delete...

Yes, anytime. Back and forward. Only take into account, that comments are not deleted, nor moved between the two tables.

Please start using yvComment - many questions will be answered! Good luck!

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Text of all my messages is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Yuri, thanks once more for a very thorough reply. You have convinced me that you have done some very good out of the box thinking and I will give it a try now with high expectations. I am glad to see that you agree with the idea of an exclusion filter - that might be something of use for the whole community!

Having played with yvComment for an evening I have to say that in spite of my prior doubts it is a very nice component. I am spoiled by having used mXcomment which is a great piece of work with lots of options, bells and whistles and which can be customised at will with some effort. However I like the straight-forward purpose-mindedness of yvComment, and I think it is not very far from being perfect out of the box if a few improvements are made. Let me give you some constructive feedback on what I think can be improved.

- First of all I now really think that you should try and offer an easy to install hack of the article manager to create a checkbox which filters out all the comments regardless of other filters applied. Or to make it a hack of wider use in the community, you could allow a section or category to be filtered out. I really think I would not be very happy with yvComment if my article manager was filled with comments so this is important.

- Also important in my view is that there should be an option to prevent the plugin from acting on section or category blog views. The "Link 'Comments(N)' text to other page" option merely changes the "Add your comment" link into "Comments (0)" and I think I will not be alone in not wanting anything related to comments in section and category blog views.

- Another important improvement would be allowing for category and article IDs to be included or excluded. You already have this option for sections. This would be necessary for example if you have an 'About' page which is uncategorised or if you have a category where you do not want comments while you do want comments in the rest of the section.

- To put visitors at ease, in the front-end comment form I would replace "Your email:" by "Your email (remains hidden):". BTW I have not seen the email address listed in the back-end.

- The front-end form is tidy but the fields fill the width of the page, I don't like the colour much and I would prefer the details to be on one line. That is just my preference, and of course I could get the files by ftp and edit them at will. However I was thinking that I will not be the only one with a personal preference so perhaps it would be good to add an option in the component to edit the html and css of the front-end output, if possible separated by an option for the form and one for the display of comments.

- In the back-end comments list you should definitely try to put a button to publish or unpublish a comment, like the button in the articles manager.

- Moreover, you have made so much effort to stay close to articles as you said earlier, and I thought it was a pity to see that you did not drive that point hom to its logical conclusion by making the comments list look like the articles manager. You could make columns like id | checkbox | title | published | comment | name | date, with the edit and delete (and un/publish) buttons at the top acting on checked items, and alternating dark and light grey rows. Like that the interface would be familiar. If you would allow the row height to grow then the whole text of a comment would still be visible.

- Obviously if one day you feel like doing so it would be nice if you would 'ajaxify' the form submission!

BTW I tried to make the voting plugin work on yvComments but no luck. I thought it would be a fun way to make use of your making use of the articles system to allow users to rate eachother's comments.

I also tried the Latest News module suggestion you make in your manual and can add to this that the Latest News module can take an array of section IDs so that the user can fill in all sections except the one used by yvComment.

So, thanks for a very nice extension and keep up the good work!

What's new in v.1.13:

1. Two new CSS files (themes) designed for use with yvComment. In fact, these 'themes' are not original: they are inspired by Joomla! forum (this style is default now) and by MS Outlook 2007 message lists (Gradient). These themes are included in the package of yvComment (see below).
2. Added option "Use CSS file", that allows user to select one of three style files, included with this extension, or don't use them at all (and, hence, put CSS for yvComment in your custom CSS file). (This option replaces "Use Default CSS file" option, that had only 'Yes/No' values).
Future versions of yvComment may include more styles, contributed by community members...
3. Added option "Position of 'Add your comment' form". There are two 'positions' now:
- 'Below list of comments' (default) - this is how it was before;
- 'On a separate page' - this allows you to 'hide' the form from the page, where comments are shown. Instead whole form, user sees one 'Add your comment' button only, that leads to the separate page.
4. Added option 'Subject of comments' (with values 'Hide' and 'Show'). When this option is set to 'Hide', users don't see subject (title) of the comment and don't have to write it. I think, that "default subject", e.g.: 'Re: