How to quote someone else’s words in a WordPress comment

A couple of people (Sam “Goldie” Kirk and… someone else, whose comment I’m unfortunately unable to find) have asked me how I quote others’ words in WordPress comments, so I thought I’d pen a quick blogette about it.

For many years now, WordPress has allowed some HTML in comments — other systems often strip such code out to avoid abuse. To quote someone else’s words, one uses the blockquote HTML element. This is very simple to do: you start with the element’s ‘opening tag’ (‘<blockquote>’), and end the quote with the ‘ending tag’ (‘</blockquote>’), like this:

<blockquote>
The more they overthink the plumbing, 
the easier it is to stop up the drain.
</blockquote>

The result would look something like this:

The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.

Note that the ‘ending tag’ begins with ‘</’. If you forget that forward slash symbol (as I often do!) the element isn’t closed, and everything from then on will be treated as a quote… and as site visitors can’t edit their own comments here in WordPress, it’s wise to double-check you’ve got everything right before hitting ‘send’.

If that’s interesting to you, you might also like these two posts of mine:

• How to embed links in WordPress comments (also check out the discussion with Esme in the comments on that post, about embedding images and video in comments, that may be interesting, if very confusing)
• How to add mouseover tooltips to links in WordPress