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Wordfest

Subvert the dominant paradigm and add festivity to your comments with this Textpattern version of Allen Chang’s delightfully clever Wordfest game for Symphony CMS commenters. MLP Pack compatible.

The object of Wordfest is to meet a set of constraints on writing a comment message. There is a conditional tag that allows you to flag successful comments however you choose.

Jump down to this article’s comments to see it in action; here follow the available rules and an example setup:

Available game rules

These can be set in any combination (it’s up to you to come up with a sensible set), and can be set on a per-article basis.

Text that must appear in the comment

You can stipulate a word or phrase that must appear in the comment:

• anywhere
• only at the beginning
• only at the end
• anywhere, but as an anagram

Word count and word size constraints

• maximum word count
• exact word count
• minimum word length
• maximum word length
• forbidden word length

Example setup

Here’s how the page you’re currently reading is set up:

The article body itself contains the rules:

 <txp:soo_wordfest must_begin="Without doubt" must_contain="Wordfest" min_word_length="4" />

That tag doesn’t output anything, it just sets the rules for the game. To display the rules, the article form contains this block:

<txp:soo_if_wordfest>
<a href="/txp/88/wordfest">Wordfest</a> enabled. For this article, a Wordfestive comment must:
<txp:soo_wordfest_rules wraptag="ol" break="li" />
</txp:soo_if_wordfest>

which you can see just below the comments.

I have the comments output set with break="", then have this at the top of the comments form:

<txp:soo_if_wordfestive>
<div class="comment wordfestive">
<p><small>WORDFESTIVE!</small></p>
<txp:else />
<div class="comment">
<p><small>DOUR, UNFESTIVE DRIVEL</small></p>
</txp:soo_if_wordfestive> 

So each comment will be assigned a class and a text prefix depending on whether or not the comment plays along with the rules of the game. The original Wordfest adds little icons to conforming comments. You can do whatever you like.

Posted 2009-08-01 (last modified 2009-09-20)

Comments

Wordfest enabled. For this article, a Wordfestive comment must:

1. contain the word “Wordfest”
2. begin with the phrase “Without doubt”
3. only use words that are at least 4 letters long

Commenting is closed for this article.

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