Posted by Fox on September 10, 2007 at 3:57 PM

So with the recent announcement that TypePad are making changes to the way comments work on your TypePad blog, users of their Advanced Templates, including me, are facing some issues.

The basis of the change is that TypePad will now automatically "paginate" your comments into multiple sets, meaning posts on your TyepPad blog will show the first 25 comments left on a post, and then allow your readers to click to the "next page" of comments to read the next 25, and so on. The actual number of comments to be shown can be changed within your feedback preferences.

This will be live for all users of TypePad's Standard themes within 6-8 weeks, but for users of their Advanced templates not much information is available, all we know is...

We will be providing these features to users of Advanced Templates. Users with Advanced Templates are not part of today's release, but the features will be rolled to those users in the next several weeks. At that time we will be providing a full set of documentation regarding how you can apply new template tags to your blog to provide paginated comments. Read more.

Using TypePad Modules?
If you're using straight forward 'TypePad Modules' within your advanced templates, I'm guessing that the dev team over at TypePad will make intregration of the changes fairly painless, with little or no tweaking required by you, except for setting your preferences.

But if you're a pro user with lots of custom TypePad hacks and tweaks used in your 'Individual Archives Template', we're going to have to sort out a couple of bits and pieces within the template. Including:

• Setting the number of comments to be shown per page.
• Inserting the "next page" and "Previous Page" links.

My Main Question
Another issue I've yet to understand is how a specific comment will know what page it's on. How will it know whether it's on page 1, 2 or 3 etc?

Now this is important to understand, because I feature 'recent comments' in my sidebar(s). I have no idea how this will work.

I've applied to be an Advanced Templates Beta Tester so I can get in early and figure it out. If accepted, I'll make sure that I get a 'how-to-guide' in place to make it as painless as possible.