UPDATE: This application is now available. Please see the following page: http://www.danieldura.com/moderator/
I wanted to give everyone a quick sneak peak of something I am working, that I should be releasing next week. As you can tell by the footer on this page, this blog is powered by WordPress. I have found WordPress to be one the best, most feature rich, well coded, and well designed publishing platforms. It is easy to update, is customizable, and most importantly (for me atleast) is very extensible.
One problem I have though is that the dashboard is a web based application in my browser and one of the functions I use the most is, comment moderation, only sends notifications via email. What I really wanted was a desktop solution to alert me when new comments are awaiting moderation.
I did find one solution, but it is only on Windows. Man, I really wish there was a way to have a cross platform application that even allowed me to approve and deny comments from my desktop. Hmm… what could I use…
As you probably figured, AIR is a PERFECT candidate for this use case, and so I just went ahead and built an app myself. This screenshot is the application actually working. I have it running against a local version of a WordPress installation. It gives alerts when new comments are awaiting moderation, tells you how many comments are awaiting moderation in the dock menu, and allows you to approve comments, mark them as spam, or delete them.
If you want to try out the application, you will have to wait a week or two. I still have a few bugs to fix, and I want to test it out against a real installation first, probably mine (or maybe my brother’s since he doesn’t seem to be posting much lately.) If you have any feature requests or if you think this is interesting, please feel free to leave a comment, it will give me a chance to test out the app as well!
Daniel Dura 
Nice! Here’s a test comment to moderate. π
Christian
Ciao,
looks great and very useful. Couple of features.
1 – I would be interested is a notification that tells me if the blog is up and running, maybe just a green/red icon pop-up or something.
2 – multiple blogs, I have several!
Alessandro
Hey Danny, Nice!
Thats my only complaint as well is that youve got to hit the dashboard to moderate or follow links in email to approve. A tool like this would kickass. Looking forward to it!
A new version of akismet just came out 2.1.8 so you might want to install that and test against it as well.
I actually use a wordpress plugin that helps me ban IP’s of spammers, etc, its called WP-Ban – http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/
So I wrote a small wordpress plugin that allows you to extract all the IP’s addresses of comments flagged as SPAM by akismet, and then sort them, eliminate duplicates and export them out all from one page, so you can either automatically insert them into the WP-BAN IP list or use them in other plugins.
I’ve found that harvesting these offending IP’s and banning them drops the number of spam comments I have to moderate or view by a couple order of magnitude. If your interested in the source so you could possibly incorporate some sort of Spammer IP listing, drop me a note and I’ll send you the source -warts and all. π
See ya!
Rob
Nice. About damn time something like this was made.
I’ll second the multiple blogs comment. But mainly, awesome! Nice solution for an irritating problem.
That will come in handy
Good stuff Danny, I’d be happy to test it on my WP blog.
Cool concept. It’s looking good too.
Ping me if you want someone to help test or if you want any assistance with the project.
Agree with Alessandro on his feature requests. π
Also new feature request: Approve All, deny all, checkbox next to each entry.
You are missing an end bracket here. π
Renders as “As you probably figured, is a PERFECT candidate for this use case,”
<a href=”http://www.adobe.com/go/air”AIR is a PERFECT candidate for this use case,
testing testing 1 2 3
This could be a great utility for the wordpress community π
Do you plan to open source it?
A reply feature to add your own comment so you can respond would make this one of the most important pieces of software I could ever have. Multiple blog capability would be fantastic, too. Thank you for building this app, I think it’ll be a big hit.
wow, great work, thx, does it support unicode? does it support chinese character I mean?
Looks like a great app! π
Great work.
I think the possibility to “edit” the comment before approving it would make a handy additional feature.
There is a wordpress plugin that’s doing some good things on comments to, maybe it can inspire you on further development:
http://www.blogperfume.com/plugin-wp-ajax-edit-comments-for-wp-25/
http://www.raproject.com/ajax-edit-comments-20/
Can I apply for italian translation? π
great. this is the perfect app i m waiting for.
If you want to do a German version, let me know.
Excellent aplication! don’t add any features, just accept or no buttons and its great… no “fancy functions” ’cause that functions always make problems.
I’ll be waitting the release of this one π
Great work man!
Nice one, I had written a API for managing comments remotely, I thought of releasing it publicly but WP will be having something built in the future.
I guess you would be using normal html screenscraping for now, shifting to a API in future would do real good.
Daniel; When you release this I will personally recommend you for knighthood or sainthood. Whichever you prefer.
In spite of my best efforts spam is making blogging less and less fun for me.
This will be nice for all WP blogs! excelent! if you want, i cant help you with an spanish translation.
I will have to second (third?) some of the above comments:
It won’t be much use to me if you can’t do multiple blogs.
Open sourcing it would be rad, and I’d probably jump in and help with coding after I’ve started using it.
This is going to be HUGE.
Oh, and what about adding a ‘Reply’ button so you can join the conversation easily?
Any updates on this, I would love to test it out if you could send me a copy. Thanks in advance.
Any updates about this cool thingy, Daniel? I’ve been checking out every other day. π