We don’t have a lot of feedback about how our patrons are using the current equipment booking system. There may be information that users could share with one another (and the library) if given a mechanism to do so. So as part of the new booking system implementation in Drupal, we set a task of including a commenting feature. Each reservable piece of equipment stands alone as a node so all we have to do is turn on commenting, right?

Basically.

But there are a couple of things that are worth noting about that.

If you’re enabling comments on a content type, it’s probably a good idea to consider who can view (and post comments to) that content. That’s all in the permissions table.

In our scenario, we didn’t want unauthenticated comments and we didn’t want to restrict the individual equipment pages (e.g. the page for iPad copy 2) to any kind of login. The request to reserve equipment from that page would trigger the login.

The snippet from the permissions table below shows how we adjusted the comment access. Note that these will be permissions that will apply anywhere else on we’re using comments on our site … we’re not currently, but if we do in the future we’re fine with this access level.

Once authenticated, the comment form defaults to give users a text format selection option. There are advantages to users selecting a WYSIWYG format This too can be handled in the text format configurations or even the permissions table. An easier way is with the Simplify module.

Simplify gives you an interface to hide a bunch of stuff that may be noisy to users adding content — publishing options, path settings, etc.

And for comments it lets you hide text formats.

The finished product: