How to check and update current post's discussion settings?

[abid76]

In WP's general settings, we enabled commenting for posts by default.

For any reason (maybe bug, maybe user misbehavior) commenting is disabled for some posts after publishing.

Therefore, I implemented a plain JS event listener which checks the current discussion settings when the editor clicks on "Publish".

// file my-block-editor-js.js
function isCommentsEnabledInBlockEditor() {
    // Retrieve comments checkbox by it's label text (German)
    const xpath = "//label[text()='Kommentare erlauben']";
    const matchElem = document.evaluate(xpath, document, null, XPathResult.FIRST_ORDERED_NODE_TYPE, null).singleNodeValue;
    if (matchElem) {
        const id = matchElem.getAttribute("for");
        if (id) {
            return document.getElementById(id).checked;
        }
    }
}

function registerPublishBtnHandler() {
    const publishBtnArray = document.getElementsByClassName("editor-post-publish-button__button");
    if (publishBtnArray && publishBtnArray.length > 0) {
        const publishBtn = publishBtnArray[0];
        if (publishBtn) {
            publishBtn.addEventListener("click", function (e) {
                if (!isCommentsEnabledInBlockEditor()) {
                    if (!confirm("Comments are disabled. Still publish?")) {
                        e.preventDefault();
                        e.stopPropagation();
                    }
                }
            });
        }
    }
}

window.addEventListener('load', function () {
    registerPublishBtnHandler();
});

This doesn't work anymore with WordPress current version 6.6.1 as there is no "Allow commenting" checkbox anymore.

Obviously, it would be better to use the WordPress JavaScript API.

I search in the repo and did quite a lot of research on the web but didn't find anything helpful.

So my question is: how to access and update current post's discussion settings via API?

Disclaimer: there's an unanswered question on stackexchange regarding this issue.

[abid76]

10 minutes after asking the question I found it out 🙂

You can access current comment status via

wp.data.select('core/editor').getEditedPostAttribute('comment_status')

So the current solution is:

// file my-block-editor-js.js
function isCommentsEnabledInBlockEditor() {
    return wp.data.select('core/editor').getEditedPostAttribute('comment_status') === 'open';
}

function registerPublishBtnHandler() {
    const publishBtnArray = document.getElementsByClassName("editor-post-publish-button__button");
    if (publishBtnArray && publishBtnArray.length > 0) {
        const publishBtn = publishBtnArray[0];
        if (publishBtn) {
            publishBtn.addEventListener("click", function (e) {
                if (!isCommentsEnabledInBlockEditor()) {
                    if (!confirm("Comments are disabled. Still publish?")) {
                        e.preventDefault();
                        e.stopPropagation();
                    }
                }
            });
        }
    }
}

window.addEventListener('load', function () {
    registerPublishBtnHandler();
});

Still it's not optimal to use a plain JS click handler to listen for publish ... but at least I got one step further.