Comment form above the comments

If I read this correctly, this patch allows you to set the comment form to show above or below the list of comments. I presume that if you set it to show above the comments and on a new page that you would then see the comment form followed by the comments after having clicked a link to add a comment?

Additionally, would it not be better to override this in the theme template (?) instead of modifying one of the core modules?

Not being comfy modifying core, I just thought I'd post a tentative CSS solution.

The comment form lives in a wrapper with class="box". On node pages, "box" lives inside the div with id="comments". To get the comment form above the first comment, just absolutely position #comments .box {} at top:0px, give it an explicit height, and then add a padding-top to #comments that is the same size as that height in order to push the first comment below the form you just positioned.

So your markup is something like:

<div id="comments">

  <comment></comment>
  <comment></comment> etc.

  <div class="box>
    <comment form></comment form>
  </div>

</div>

And your style is:

#comments {
   position: relative; /*required for the absolute positioning on "box" to work*/
   padding-top: 400px;
}

#comments .box {
   position: absolute;
   height: 400px;
   top: 0px;
}

Obviously, if you have styling or markup inside "box" that will cause the content to exceed your height, it will overlap the first comments in the comment list. Also, browsers with resizable textarea boxes will resize overtop of any other regular markup, as the absolute positioning takes it out of the flow (at least, I think that's the reason).

I'm not a seasoned CSS builder, so if anyone out there knows any situations (especially common ones) that will break this, please post!
:)

The age of this type of module has no bearing since it's a theme function and the apis in drupal 6 don't change. Realistically you don't "need" a contrib module to do this. It (the module) was created so that users wouldn't have to write any code.

You can override the comment-wrapper.tpl.php, copy it from modules/comment to yourTheme/templates directory.
And the place the render of the form above your rendered comments like so.

<div id="comments" class="<?php print $classes; ?>"<?php print $attributes; ?>>

  <!-- Add new comment form -->
  <?php if ($content['comment_form']): ?>
    <h2 class="title comment-form"><?php print t('Add new comment'); ?></h2>
    <?php print render($content['comment_form']); ?>
  <?php endif; ?>

  <!-- Render comments if exists -->
  <?php if ($content['comments'] && $node->type != 'forum'): ?>
    <?php print render($title_prefix); ?>
    <h2 class="title"><?php print t('Comments'); ?></h2>
    <?php print render($title_suffix); ?>
  <?php endif; ?>

  <?php print render($content['comments']); ?>

</div>