Beside other things this includes Gravatar styling and also adding different styling to comments from the author of an article. In this article I will show you how to realize the latter with Wordpress 2.7 and above.

Let’s start by looking at the code to achieve styling of author comments prior to Wordpress 2.7. On kremalicious.com I’ve used this code:

<li class="
  <?php
    if ($comment->comment_author_url == "http://www.kremalicious.com")
      echo 'author';
    else echo $oddcomment;
  ?>
  item" id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">
    <em>other comments code</em>
  </li>

So with some php stuff we were able to check for the author name or, as I did it, for the URL of the comment author. If one of these were detected Wordpress added a new class ‘author’ to the <li> tag which we were able to style by adding a li.author to our css file:

li.author {
  /* css comes in here */
}

But with Wordpress 2.7 these steps are needless because of the new function <?php wp_list_comments(); ?> which adds a class on author comments for itself!

If a comment from the author of an article is posted under this article, Wordpress automatically adds the class ‘bypostauthor’ to the surrounding <li> tag. So all you have to do is adding a css style of li.bypostauthor to your css file or just renaming your old li.author class or whatever you used for this:

li.bypostauthor {
  /* css comes in here */
}

And that’s it for adding a different style to comments from the article author. Just add some css and there you go. Wonderful!

Even more

Wordpress also has a special class for registered users of your site so you’re able to style their comments as well. For this just use the class ‘byuser’:

li.byuser {
  /* css comes in here */
}

All the various classes Wordpress adds to comments are listed in the Codex page for enhanced comments display. And here’s a very nice grahical overview about everything Wordpress 2.7 adds to comments.