How to Highlight Author Comments in Drupal

Since I switched to drupal 6.x, I have been been looking for way to change the color of an author's comments. Having a distinctive color makes it simple, to quickly scan a thread to see when an author has left a comment. I solved the problem, at first I using an if statement, to add a class reference, then further refined the code using a ternary operator.

1. First edit comment.tpl.php to add a new class reference (i.e 'author-comment').

This is a snippet of the original comment.tpl.php before the editing:

I used this if statement to add the class reference to the div . It checks if the comment author is the same person as the node's author the comment is attached.

Next I optimized the code by replacing the if statement with a ternary operator.

2. Next you need add this rules to your style.css file.

In this example only the author's comments will be themed with a yellow background and grey outline.

This method works in drupal 5.x, and drupal 6.x for PHPTemplate-powered themes.