For a long time, I’ve been looking for a plugin that would change the commenting area for the blog author so that regular commenter’s or visitors would be able to tell at a glance when the author of a post or blog replied to a comment. Thank goodness the search is over. Thanks to the recent mention on the WeblogToolsCollection blog, I have found Highlight Author Comments.

Highlight Author comments was exceptionally easy to install. Once you download the plugin, unzip the contents to your desktop or a folder of your choosing. Upload the highlight-author.php file into your plugins directory and activate the plugin.

The plugin options were located on my install by clicking on the OPTIONS link and then HIGHLIGHT COMMENTS. There is only one configurable option for this plugin and that is the CSS styling. This is where knowing CSS helps. All I wanted to do was change the background color of my comments. Here is a screenshot showing how I did it.

The plugin homepage actually contains a few examples of CSS code that you can edit, copy and paste into this box. One thing worth noting is that you don’t need to place a { or } at the beginning and end of your CSS. The plugin does this automatically.

I have this plugin installed and running. You’ll notice my comments now have a shade or two darker grey when compared to everyone else’s comments. I think it’s a good plugin for every blog to have. It’s nice to browse through a post that may have 100 comments and being able to pick which ones were from the article author at a glance. It also let’s visitors do a quick Who’s Who.

I suppose I can set my unreplied forum topic requesting this plugin to RESOLVED. Thanks goes out to Rob Marsh for creating this plugin. I and many others really appreciate it.