I am sure someone presented this tool at Innovations this year... we have a client on WCM that would like visitors to the site to be able to leave comments on pieces/articles they read on their WCM site. This is something you see on most major sites, like cnn.com.
Has anyone added this to their WCM site?
Thanks.
Okay thanks for the great suggestion, I'll discuss Disqus with them.
I guess the only downside is that members would have to create separate accounts for Disqus. That might not be a bad thing, as perhaps people want to be able to leave comments under a pseudonym, but it's confusing for people to have to log in twice with different accounts on the same site.
Although there probably is an API we could tie in to, that might invovle some additional work. But I do see this as a great option so thanks again.
They won't actually need to create a Disqus account. You can allow "guests" to comment on the site, in which case the user would just type in an email address and their name (and an optional link to a website). If you don't want to allow Guest comments, users can use their Facebook account to leave a comment, or Google, or Yahoo, or Twitter or any OpenID account.
There are situations where you may need to use the API to integrate with the iMIS member database, but those situations are probably rare and I've found Disqus' out-of-the-box features to be sufficient for most clients.
I should also point out that if the user uses Facebook to leave a comment, they won't actually need to login to Facebook (assuming they are already logged in), they would just need to grant Disqus permissions to their Facebook profile.
And lastly, I should note that even though Disqus is free right now, it may not always stay that way ;)
Hope it works out Keith!
Cheers,
James
Keith, when it comes to
Keith, when it comes to commenting, it doesn't get any better than Disqus (as far as I'm concerned). You can implement Disqus very easily, it just requires a few lines of JavaScript to be added to your template. If you want it to show up only on certain pages, then you can build a custom .NET control that will add the Disqus comments (or not) depending on the URL. If you want it to be on all WCM pages, then you could simply add it to the master page inside your interior content panel.
I mentioned this in our WCM panel discussion at the Discovery conference and somebody in the audience had questioned why WCM didn't come with comments. One thing I didn't mention that I should have mentioned is that even if WCM had comments, I would probably still use Disqus anyway. Disqus is a company that only does comments. They are focused, best of breed, and they do it really really well. Lots of CMS platforms come with comments, but they rarely compare to the features that you will get with Disqus.
Anyway, you can read all about it on the Disqus website and best of all, it's FREE!
Cheers,
James / Bursting Silver