I’ve been trying to work out the best way for contributors to be able to post to our Public Sociology blog so that the public cannot see them but other logged in users can both read and comment as part of the editorial process. I found that posting as draft was no good as you could not add comments in preview. Preview is the only way of viewing a draft post. If you add comments and save the screen goes blank and the comment is not saved.

So at the moment the procedure I have recommended is to post as private. Commenting is then possible in the normal way and editorial comments will be deleted before a post is made public.

However, I then discovered this method of making draft posts commentable:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/296618 (many thanks to jberculo for posting this)

It involves changing a line in the wp-comments-post.php file.

do_action(‘comment_on_draft’, $comment_post_ID);

is changed to:

do_action(‘pre_comment_on_post’, $comment_post_ID);

and the following

exit;

is removed

I have tried this in the wp-comments-post.php for Public Sociology and it works fine. Comments can be added to draft posts. I copied the original wp-comments-post.php as wp-comments-post-original.php before making any changes.

The problem with this is that it is a hack and would have to be repeated if wp-comments-post.php is replaced during an upgrade. Is there a better way of doing this, a plugin perhaps?