It's often necessary for my moderators to reply to (rather than censor or delete) user comments. This works OK, but there's a problem: If they reply as <company name>, it sounds very impersonal. But if they reply using their own name, any random user could pretend to work for the company.

I'd like to subtly differentiate (using CSS) between normal user comments and moderator comments so that users can get a personal response, but still know they're getting an official answer.

It would be nice to have a bit more flexibility with template tags. If {usertype} returned just "sadministrator" instead of "<span class="administrator">SAdministrator</span>" I could do something like:

<li class = 'post {usertype}'>

and then have the flexibility to style anything under that top li based on that CSS class.

As it is, I managed to get what I wanted by doing:

...{usertype}<div class='posthead'>...

and

#Comments ul li.post span.administrator {

    display: none;

}

#Comments ul li.post span.administrator + div.posthead {

    background-color: #cc0000;

}

But that feels a bit clunky.

Personally, I'm an advocate of making templates by using XSLT to transform generic XML output, e.g.:

<comment><id>1</id><ip>64.50.19.XXX</ip><usertype>superadmin</usertype>...</comment>

into HTML/RSS/etc. Unfortunately, no one I've met agrees with me.

Anyway, hopefully my hack or my input are useful to someone.

By the way, I really appreciate the work you guys are doing. !Joomlacomment isn't perfect, but it seems to be the most feature-rich commenting system for Joomla! out there, and every time I get a new version, I'm blown away at the number of things that are vastly improved, including the overall maturity of the product. Keep up the good work!