If you have been following my twitter updates for the past week, you won’t have failed to notice my troubles with the Disqus comments system. What is Disqus do I hear you asking, probably not but I am going to explain anyway.
The Disqus plugin is a comments system that replaces the default WordPress comments system and replaces it with a more funky and functional one. My experiences all started when I wondered if there was a way to change the default avatars in the WordPress system from gravitars to twitter pictures. Only problem was that every tool out there I could not find simple instructions on how to integrate it into my system, they were not written for WordPress 2.7. But then I found a plugin called twitconnect, which allowed commenter’s to sing in with twitter, which was great but then I got to thinking, well what about Facebook, so I looked around and came across blog after blog which offended sign in with both twitter and Facebook via the Disqus plugin,
Now I had a few problems with getting it running, but ignore mine, my.htaccess file was all messed up and was causing all sorts of issues but that was my fault rather than Disqus’s and its all fixed now.
Setting it up is actually rather easy, I downloaded the plugin, installed it and set up an account with Disqus, getting twitter sign in was easy as twitter have made it really, really easy to do it. However Facebook is another matter, to set up Facebook as an option to sign in with, you need to set up your own Facebook app, that’s right you actually have to set up an app. Now here is the bad part, Facebook have changed the process for making an app 3 times since Disqus hooked up with them so the instructions are no good however I did find some that helped me.
Now the problems I had lasted a week and I really could not get my head around it all, so I vented my frustration on twitter, and what happed, the guys behind Disqus tweeted at me and helped me sort it out, I was really impressed by their assistance and professionalism and after they were so helpful I can only highly recommend Disqus and would encourage all you bloggers out there to let them run your comments system.
Since then it works like a charm and people can sign in using both Facebook and twitter, so I get to see lovely avatars and profile pictures instead of a generic picture, which makes the whole thing look nicer and cleaner. Plus now if anybody happens to comment on other blogs which use Disqus (an ever growing number) they can use just one account to comment on all those blogs including mine! Or if they don’t they can just use their existing Facebook account. Now here is waiting for OpenIDs introduction, that would make the whole thing complete.
Now I finally feel fully connected, my blog updates twitter every time I post a new entry, twitter updates Facebook and now with Disqus people can even add to their Facebook wall their comments on my blog, so all in all its rather cool.
Have Fun
Michael
