#1540 Posted in ‘CommentBox’

Comments workflow ideas

Latest post by Lefteris Kavadas on Wednesday, 19 August 2026 10:33 EEST

Tuesday, 28 July 2026 14:33 EEST

Joomla Community Magazine

Hi Lefteris,

Thanks for improving the way comments are handled on the Joomla Community Magazine website. That helps a lot!

We have another question though. At the moment, this is our workflow:

  1. comment is submitted
  2. admin and author receive a notification with a preview of the comment (yayy, that's great)
  3. admin moderates (and publishes) the comment
  4. (actually I don't know what happens next - I think the commenter gets a notification that the comment is published)

It would make more sense if the author got notified AFTER the comment is published. We do get spam comments and we don't want to bother our authors with those. Plus the author now can't respond until a moderator (AKA me) has found the time to approve the comment. 

The ideal workflow would be:

  1. comment is submitted
  2. admin receives a notification
  3. admin moderates the comment and publishes it
  4. author gets a notification: you have a comment!
  5. commenter gets a notification

How does that sound? Maybe this is possible already and we don't know it yet :)

Thanks,

Anja

Wednesday, 29 July 2026 12:47 EEST

Lefteris Kavadas

Hi Anja,

I’m glad to hear the recent improvements are helping!

I think we could make this work by slightly adjusting the notification workflow based on the page author’s permissions.

My idea would be:

  • If the page author has permission to approve comments, they would continue receiving the notification as soon as a comment is submitted, since they can review and publish it themselves.
  • If the page author does not have permission to approve comments, they would instead receive the notification only after the comment has been approved and published by a moderator.

This way authors are only notified about comments they can actually act on, while also avoiding notifications for spam or comments that may never be published.

What do you think?

Edited by admin on 2026-07-29 16:03 EEST

Wednesday, 29 July 2026 13:08 EEST

Joomla Community Magazine

I think the idea is good.

In our case authors would not have permission to review and publish comments made for their articles (because that would make them moderators). We wouldn't need that, but I can imagine this being different for other websites, so it could be a setting.

Just checking: "own comments" should be read as "comments for their articles" right? These could be comments by someone other than the article author?

Thanks,

Anja

 

Wednesday, 29 July 2026 16:09 EEST

Lefteris Kavadas

Hi Anja,

Yes, you’re right. I removed the “own comments” phrase because it was misleading.

The condition is actually quite simple:

  • If the author of the article has permission to approve comments, they receive the notification as soon as a new comment is submitted.
  • If they don’t have that permission, they receive the notification only after the comment has been approved and published.

Just to clarify, this change would apply only to the recently added Page Author notifications. The existing New Comments notification would continue to work exactly as it does today for the user groups that have it enabled, so there would be no change to the current moderation workflow.

I think this approach should work well for both your workflow and websites where authors are also responsible for moderating comments.

Thursday, 30 July 2026 18:57 EEST

Joomla Community Magazine

Great, this is a very logical approach. Thank you!

Wednesday, 19 August 2026 10:33 EEST

Lefteris Kavadas

Hi Anja,

Just a quick update to let you know that CommentBox 1.4.1 has just been released, and it includes the Page Author notification enhancement we discussed.

Page authors will now be notified:

  • When a comment is submitted, if they have permission to approve comments.
  • When a comment is published, if they don’t have permission to approve comments.

As discussed, this only affects the Page Author notifications. The general New Comments notifications continue to work as before for the enabled user groups.

Thanks again for the feedback and suggestion!

Best regards,
Lefteris

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