Caveat
Unfortunately, due to ill-health, this plugin has not been developed or supported properly for some years. It works with the latest versions of WordPress (including on this website) but could possibly conflict with any WordPress features added after 2008 — e.g. custom post types — if you use them.
Purpose
Highlight Author Comments automatically displays comments made by a post’s author in a distinctive style with no need to edit your template files, etc. All you do is provide a snippet of CSS styling to be applied to author posts.
This is version 1.0.3 
.
- 1.0.3 accommodates inconsistencies in case of the email addresses used to locate author posts.
- 1.0.2 adds new option to style the comment author link as well as the comment body; also fixes the collapsing paragraph bug.
- 1.0.0 is the original version.
Installation Instructions
Highlight Author Comments is installed in 3 easy steps:
- Unzip the “Highlight Author Comments” archive and copy the folder to /wp-content/plugins/
- Activate the plugin
- Use the Options > Highlight Comment admin page to enter the CSS styling you want to apply to author comments.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Do I Enter in the Options Page?
The plugin Options page just has one text box where you put the bit of CSS you want to apply to highlighted comments. Don’t include { or }: just the CSS. For example, by default the plugin applies the CSS padding: 1em which ‘indents’ the comment a little all round. If you wanted to also make the text red, for example, you would use color: red; padding: 1em.
CSS Styling… What’s That?
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is too complex a subject to go into here. A good resource is provided by the Web Design Group.
How About Some Examples?
Here’s where some artistry would be a help! In lieu of skill here are some examples to play with:
- padding: 1em;
- padding-left: 20px;
- background-color: #FFFF95;
- border-left: 1em solid #DDD; padding: 1em;
- background: white url(http://www.yourblog.com/images/fluffy-clouds.gif)
- background-color: silver; margin-left: -2em; padding: 1em 1em 1em 2em;
- etc.
How Does It Know Which Comments to Highlight?
The plugin simply compares the email of the post author with the email of the commentor. This works fine as long as a post author is logged in when commenting. It will fail if the author is not logged in an uses a different email.