WordPress 2.7 is not due till at least end November. However you can always get a sneak peak of the freshly redesigned admin together with other cool features in Beta 2. For theme developers, are your themes going to take advantage of the new commenting features like paging and threading? Will it be 2.7 capable?

Up till 2.6.x, AJAX commenting has been rather straight forward. A successfully submitted comment will be added as the latest. However with the new enhancements in 2.7, things are just going to get slightly more complicated.

Threading only applies if you are replying to a comment. It would nest your reply a level deeper. While this is extremely useful in keeping track of a comment conversation, this is where the difficulties it poses to AJAX commenting really start to show.

When a comment is successfully posted, is it replying to any comment? Once that is out of the way, we have to then find out whether it is replying to the original comment or to another reply (another level deeper) and it goes on. This will no doubt be causing quite a stirring headache. But of course you could always tweak the number of levels you want to enable threaded comments.

Imagine reading through more than 200 comments in a post? Put me in that position and I would probably close the window before I even got started. Pagination comes as a very handy enhancement especially in scenarios like this. And unlike threading, it does not really pose much of an opposing block to AJAX commenting.

There is a discussion setting in the admin to decide how many comments you want to break into pages and which page should be shown by default. A reply to a comment is not considered in that count, only a non threaded comment is; in other words a non-reply comment. However should the maximum number of comments for a page be reached, you should be inserting the newly posted one on the next page instead.

How would you tackle AJAX commenting in WordPress 2.7? I already have an idea on how I would for MiniMoo 1.3.