How to manage WordPress comments from a mobile touchscreen device

Few days ago, a friend of mine, Vadim Sterkin requested a little plugin from me to manage Wordpress from a mobile device. This can be useful for anyone who tries to manage (approve, remove etc) comments from his tablet.  Vadim is the happy owner of a Windows 8 tablet and he has a blog too. He planned to manage the blog from his tablet but this annoyance bothered him: it is hard to manage WordPress comments without a mouse. Let me explain why.

This is how the comments list looks like normally:

Now I will hover over one comment with the mouse:

Links to manage your blog post's comments which were previously hidden, now appear under the comment text when the mouse hovers over it.

Mobile devices are touch-based and touch has no concept of "hover". On a mobile device, i.e. a tablet PC with a touch screen, you thus have no way to display those links! After looking closely at the issue, I decided to make a simple WordPress plugin for Vadim which will make those links remain visible all the time.

I would like to share that plugin with everyone, because it can be helpful for other bloggers.

So, here is the source code of my plugin:

<?php
/**
 * Plugin Name: Visible Comments Actions 
 */

add_action( "admin_head", 'comment_actions_style');

function comment_actions_style() 
{
    echo '<style type="text/css">.row-actions {visibility:visible !important;}</style>';
}
?>

The main trick is that I have forced the visibility of those links. It is defined as a CSS class with the name "row-actions". The add_action( "admin_head".. thing registers my piece of CSS only for the admin area. So, there is no longer any issue with a touch screen.

You can download the plugin from here.

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