Our lightweight services are used by many high-profile web publishers and many thousands of individual blog owners to obtain instant feedback from site visitors. But are JS-Kit products truly ready for a real Web Enterprise? We know they are. Take our Comments or Reviews, for example. Over the past year, we’ve talked and listened to a number of large web publishers and accumulated a ton of features targeted specifically at the the high end web sector.

This post is not about all these features, however. I want to focus on Subsection Moderation, a particular mechanism we have introduced for larger publishers like InfoWorld or KQED.

Let’s say you have a complex, elaborate web site with lots of products, reviews, blogs, galleries, and other moving parts. Chances are, the site development process is organized hierarchially. Different departments develop their sections of the web site independently, with dedicated people doing their section updates and general oversight.

Figure 1. Snapshot of a customized JS-Kit Comment at an InfoWorld blog post

Ideally, we in JS-Kit want our services to be present everywhere on your web site. This brings up some interesting integration questions:

• Is it possible to customize JS-Kit services appearing on specific parts of the web site differently, depending on a particular section’s color scheme and branding?
• Is it possible to dedicate a specific person for each section to be responsible for moderating user generated comments and reviews feedback?
• Can one delegate authority for bringing in additional moderation help to a specific person or persons?

The first question is fully addressed with our Comments customization approach. With all the customization options for fonts, colors, images, as well as presentation templates and server side configuration knobs, the JS-Kit suite of services is incredibly adaptable to the corporate style and branding requirements. To the right, check out how InfoWorld has customized JS-Kit Comments for one of their blogs.

The other two questions are addressed by the Subsection Moderation feature. With Subsection Moderation, site administrators can assign any number of additional moderators, each having authority over a subsection of the site.

Adding moderators is easy. If you know their OpenID URLs, just go to theJS-Kit Settings page, click on “Invite others to moderate” and add OpenID URLs with appropriate privileges.

If future moderators don’t already have OpenID credentials, just ask them to create an account on any OpenID 1.1 compliant provider, such aspip.verisignlabs.com or myopenid.com. Actually, you can create the OpenID credentials for them yourself.

Figure 2. Snapshot of the JS-Kit Settings page

Subsection moderators can be granted the following privileges:

• Moderation rights for the web site, or a set of its subsections.
• Ability to invite other subsection moderators. This does not give them the full site administration permissions.
• Full privileges, equalling to the privilege of a site administrator.

Each subsection moderator can have authority over one or more sections of the web site. A subsection is defined as a prefix of the path=”" attribute you give to the Comments widget <div> when you add it to a page. For example, if you have three sections on your site, say “News”, “Arts” and “Movies”, you could have the path=”" attribute set to“/news/123″, “/arts/123″ and “/movies/123″ on different pages, where 123 denotes an article identifier in your database. Given that, you may assign a “News” section moderator by specifying the “/news” path prefix, and a “Movies” moderator by specifying the “/movies” prefix. The use of path=”" attribute is explained in the Comments customization page.

Once you have added moderators, you should see something like this on the subsection moderators invitation page:

Figure 3. Screenshot of subsection moderation preferences.

On this screenshot for the js-kit.com web site, we have three site moderators: foozao (Brandon), kingtury (Art), and lionet (that would be me). In addition to that, we have specified that kingtury‘s moderation authority is to be limited to the “/comments” and “/ratings” subsections of js-kit.com site (Art, this is not true, I just tweaked it for the screenshot). Further, foozao is allowed to add more moderators to this list. The last item, lionet.info, denotes my own privileges, which I cannot change.

If you want to change the authority level for a particular moderator, just click on the appropriate Rights checkboxes.

If you want to assign a different set of subsections to a moderator, just add his or her OpenID URL again with a different set of path prefixes in the “Access to” input field. It’ll override the old prefixes set.

That’s it, try it out!