WordPress 1 Minute Wonder – Styling Author Comments

This is the first in the series of my 1 Minute Wonder series for WordPress where I’ll be showing simple and quick tricks for WordPress to add a little extra to your blog or WordPress powered website. And in this series debut I’ll be showing you how to add extra styling to the comments made by the post author.

So a quick caveat… this trick depends on your theme’s implementation… hopefully it’s been created with all the correct semantic markup needed. If you find this doesn’t work then to resolve the issue may take slightly longer than the one minute.

So here we go, all you really need to do is add the following to your current theme’s style.css file (usually located in ~/wp-content/themes/<theme_name>/ directory);

.commentlist li.bypostauthor {
  background: #f1f1f1;
  border:1px solid #999;
  -moz-border-radius: 10px;
  -webkit-border-radius: 10px;
  -o-border-radius: 10px;
  border-radius: 10px;
  -moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 7px #999;
  -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 7px #999;
  -o-box-shadow: 3px 3px 7px #999;
  box-shadow: 3px 3px 7px #999;
}

What we’ve done here is added extra styling to give the author’s comments a background specific background colour with a nice rounded border and a subtle box shadow. The rounding of the corners and the shadow are created using CSS3 so may not show on older browsers.

This styling can be seen on this very blog over at this post on the Responsive TwentyTen child theme for WordPress. Of course the comment can be styled in any manner of ways depending on the CSS you apply.

[jbox color=”blue” vgradient=”#fdfeff|#bae3ff” title=”Found this useful?”]If you’ve used this technique on your site for styling comments then please leave me a comment below with a link so I can take a peak.[/jbox]