Styling Tip: Simplify Comment Design
This is the first in a series of articles which will hopefully inspire and help you style the IntenseDebate comment system so it fits better with your blog. We’ve reached a point in IntenseDebate’s history where the basic HTML and CSS classes the comment system is built on is solid, so now you should be able to style it more than ever, without fear of your new styles breaking in future updates.
Styling IntenseDebate: Simplify comment design
If you have a really clean and simple blog, you might find IntenseDebate’s pretty glossy comment headers and rounded corners a bit too much. With just a few simple CSS rules, you can alter the comment header to your own liking. In this tutorial we’ll be modifying the .idc-c-h element, which is “ID language” for “.IntenseDebateComments-Comment-Header”.
How to use this guide
All styles can be added either to your “Custom CSS” box in your IntenseDebate admin panel (recommended, go to Settings>Custom CSS) or directly to your blogs/sites stylesheet.
- First, we’ll remove the normal background from the comment headers, apply a top border and make sure the padding and margins look good.
#idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-c-h {
background: none;
border-top: 1px solid #ddd;
padding: 3px 0 0;
}Background: none; means we’ve removed the normal background image. If you instead want a light gray background, you could try
background: #f6f6f6;! - Next, we’ll remove the spacing around the comment elements that make it not align with our new pretty top border. If you add in these CSS elements, you should know how all of the comment contents perfectly aligned with the top border:
#idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-c-h-inner {
margin: 0;
}#idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-c-t,
#idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-c-b {
margin-left: 0;
margin-right: 0;
}#idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-c-b .idc-btn_s {
margin-left: 0 !important;
} - Lastly, if you still want a special look for the comments posted by an admin, we can apply a special styling to admin comments by using the class
.idc-c.idc-adminthis class is used for all admin comments posted on your blog.
#idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-c.idc-admin .idc-c-h {
border-top-color: #c00;
}
This style will exchange the light gray border we just added for a very fashionable dark red shade.
Tips on styling IntenseDebate:
- When you want to start styling IntenseDebate, and need to know what the elements in the comment system are called, we highly recommend FireBug, a developer extension for Firefox. Using the Inspect feature, you can just click the element you want to style, and it will bring up all the CSS associated by it, including what the element’s CSS class is. Pretty handy!
- Look up the element you want to style, for instance
.idc-c-hand then apply#idc-container-parentto the rule when you write the CSS. In this example, you would write#idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-c-hto style .idc-c-h, the comment header. - Put your new CSS rules in the Custom CSS box in your IntenseDebate admin panel, located at Settings>Custom CSS.
Make sure you check out our CSS Documentation for a complete list of elements you can style in IntenseDebate with tips on how to modify them, and feel free to let us know if you have any questions. Until next time!
Posted by Isaac Keyet in features
IntenseDebate - Official Blog 
i dont need styling or lot of features.. all what i need is translation, what i send 3 weeks ago.. and as i read other comments im not alone who waits translations!!!
I just responded to your other comment. My apologies for the delay. Can you please resend your translation to the labs address? Thank you.
my translation is resended to labs address. i hope that now comes possobilty to use this translation…
Thanks for posting the primer. Can't wait to dig into the ID css.
great thing… This takes the comments customization to another level.:)
How do I stop these comments people apply next to my picture?
Oh I get it – intensedebate put a comment there saying something like "milfordresident is hiding under a rock and doesn't want to be known" because I had not put one there yet – yeah you guys think your funny…that was funny.
Sorry for the confusion. We'll update that text.
Hi there,
Thank you for your post!
Could you maybe give a few tips on how to implement this system with a "right-to-left" design ?
What should we do if we want to have all the comment area RTL ?
Thanks,
Tal
Hi Tal, we're planning on adding the ability to switch to a RTL layout, but we haven't figured out the CSS required just yet. In the meantime if you wanted to experiment, you could play with some custom CSS yourself. You'd most likely need to start with something like
#idc-container { direction: rtl; }
and then also experiment with some float:left; and other alignment attributes in the CSS.
The plan is that this will be an option either associated automatically with certain languages, or available as a checkbox so you can easily enable/disable it.
thanks man.
Thanks for posting the primer.
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