Highlight author's comments on WordPress blog

In this short tutorial we'll take a look at a simple trick to make comments from the original post author stand out a bit more in the comment listing – useful for seeing replies to comments.

First you need to create a style to apply to highlighted comments on your blog. To do this, either in the admin editor or via SSH/FTP edit the file style.css.

Add a line that applies a style to a class called authorstyle:

.authorstyle { background-color: #fffddf !important; }

Here we've set the background to a nice yellow.

Next find the comments.php file in your theme folder and look for the following line:

<li <?php echo $oddcomment; ?>id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>"></li>

And replace it with:

<li class="<?php if ($comment->user_id == 1) $oddcomment = "authorstyle"; echo $oddcomment; ?>"></li>

When outputting the comment, this checks whether the user_id of the comment poster equals 1 (the admin user, who set up the blog) and if so applies the authorstyle class. This will only work on a single-user blog (i.e. if you have more than one author their posts will not be highlighted).