New module 'Nodecomment'

modules/nodecomment/README.txt

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+ABOUT THE NODE COMMENTS
+=======================
+
+With this module comments can be full nodes. For every content type you can 
+choose to use different content type as comment, or to continue using Drupal 
+core comments.
+Thanks to this module, comments can have fields, revisions, taxonomy, 
+uploaded files, access control and anything else that comes from the goodness 
+of nodeapi.
+
+Current maintainer: Andrey Tretyakov http://drupal.org/user/169459
+
+REQUIREMENTS
+============
+
+Views module.
+
+USAGE AND TECHNICAL DETAILS
+===========================
+
+Node Comments module has settings page at admin/settings/nodecomment. There you 
+can get overview of your content types and their Node Comment settings.
+The module also uses Comment module settings, configured per content type.
+
+Comment types can have own comments. For example, a site can have 
+products, commented by reviews, commented by comments.
+
+Comment types can be enabled to work as "content", meaning they will have own
+pages, full node titles (independently from the comment settings) and generally
+behave as content. The only requirement currently is they must be added in 
+comment context, i.e. via "Add new <type>" link for their target node.
+
+Node Comments displays comments using "nodecomments" view. You can configure 
+the view to tweak some options, but "Nodecomments" (second) display is always 
+used, and you can switch display style (e.g. set it to "table") only when node 
+comments are configured as flat in content type configuration. In threaded mode 
+Node Comments module forces usage of own display style.
+
+When deleting a node with node comments, or a node comment, child node comments
+will be automatically deleted even if the user performing the delete doesn't 
+have delete permission for them. This may be surprise for you if you previously
+used 2.x branch. This is needed not to leave orphan nodes in the database and is 
+generally in line with the core Comment module logics.
+This behavior can be changed programmatically (see Node Comments API).
+
+To theme the node comments, use general node templates. There are some tricks, 
+in terms of theming, though.
+First, because we generally repeat comment module stuff, we use "comment-123" 
+anchors (where 123 is node id). You must add these anchors to your nodecomment 
+templates for consistent scrolling.
+When previewing a nodecomment on the same page with the thread, the module
+will try to scroll to preview zone using "#preview" anchor. This
+anchor is missing from the original theme_node_preview() function so you need 
+to add it using theme override.
+
+KNOWN ISSUES
+============
+
+This module may consume more resources and run slower than the core Comment 
+module. To increase performance there is special Views caching plugin which 
+caches the view output (a list of node comments). It can cause problems with 
+modules expecting to modify node output in the list dynamically.
+There are 2 solutions to this problem:
+- the caching can be disabled via Views UI
+- using hook_views_post_render() one can insert dynamic values in the cached 
+  output. This is similar to what Node Comments module itself does. 
+
+To render node comments, the module overrides node view menu callback. This can
+conflict with other modules doing the same. This is a limitation of Drupal: only
+one function can process menu item. To deal with this problem, you can use 
+Panels module and output combined data from both Node Comments and conflicting 
+module. For more information, see http://drupal.org/node/477518.
+
+Unlike 2.x branch, 3.x doesn't have comment conversion tool anymore. It had too
+many bugs and could lose data. Current maintainer is not comfortable supporting 
+it. It can be revived as a separate module anytime, if someone is willing to do 
+that.
+This means that changing comment type when comments of that type already exist 
+can turn them into orphans, and break the database consistency. You are STRONGLY
+recommended to configure comment types only once.
+
+For efficiency and reliability the module uses MySQL-only upsert (merge) 
+queries. If you want to make the module work with Postgres, submit a patch.
+
+COMPATIBILITY WITH COMMENT MODULE
+=================================
+
+Previous branches of Node Comments had various issues with Comment module:
+- 1.x branch was not compatible at all
+- 2.x branch had many hacks, resulting in lots of bugs and compatibility issues 
+  with other contributed modules
+
+3.x branch has exactly one hack: when loading a node with node comments enabled,
+it moves "commentability" setting to own variable, so other modules 
+think the node can't be commented using Drupal core comments. When saving 
+the node, Node Comments restores that setting. Thus we fully re-use Comment 
+module default "commentability" setting and per-node "commentability" setting.