I'm very pleased to see that the crew at Quintagroup have just released PloneComments, a new product which offers  some long-overdue enhancements to the Plone commenting process, including:

• Notification to site admin of submitted comments
  
• Notification to author of approved comments
  
• Comment moderation
  
• Name field for anonymous comments
  
• List of recent comments for easier bulk moderation
• Plone control panel configlet (!) which includes
  
  • Turning on/off moderation
  • Turning on/off manager notification
  • Turning on/off editor notification
  • Turning on/off anonymous commenting
  • Configure admin email for notifications
  • Configure notification subject

It's even compatible with Plone 2.0.5 (and of course the Plone 2.1.x series).  This is great news for folks using commenting in Plone.  I'm looking forward to implementing it here on ThePloneBlog.

I hope that the framework team will seriously consider reviewing the code and if it passes muster, rolling it into Plone 3.0.  It's long past time for Plone to have these kinds of features built in.

Big thanks to Quintagroup (and any of their clients who might have sponsored the work) for making such a big contribution to the commenting experience in Plone.

Update: No sooner had I published this than I noticed that DailyKos, the planet's largest political blog, has just released a massive AJAX-powered overhaul of its extremely active comment threads. It's very impressive, and well worth mining for future UI inspiration.