Plug Into Better Commenting With Intense Debate

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:11:00 GMT

Are you using a blogging platform such as WordPress, Blogger, or TypePad? Third-party commenting solution Intense Debate announced the release of several plugins for its service which may help you leverage the power of commenting on your Web property.

If you're not familiar with Intense Debate and services like it (such as Disqus), it is a service for bloggers to "enhance and encourage" the conversation occurring on your blog or website through features like comment threading, or reply by email. Other features like commenter profiles, RSS readers and tracking, widgets, moderation/blacklisting, reputation points and comment voting, and even a simple Twitter integration make this type of service a must-have for serious, social-networking focused websites.

Plugins for Polldaddy (another Automattic company - which also owns WordPress) for embedded polls, Seesmic and YouTube (for displaying videos in blog comments) are available now. Thanks to a recently published API, expect that developers will be pushing out plugins to users of the very active commenting network.

Current users of IntenseDebate need to just log in to their dashboard to see a list of current plugins. Activating a plugin from the account requires you simply select "Activate" next to the plugin in your account. Users will see a comments section on their blog and a plugin icon at the top right of the comment box. To use the plugin, just select the icon - that's it!

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WordPress Gets Threaded Comments

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 13:32:00 GMT

Another release of WordPress (version 2.7) is expected to be released this week. The big development is the addition of threaded comments. Threaded, or nested comments, are a way of displaying comments that allow visitors to reply to a previous viewer's comment as well as your blog post itself. The advantage of using threaded comments (one solution is the popular Disqus platform) is the increased/enhanced sense of community such an offering provides.

It is important to note that if you choose to upgrade to version 2.7 of WordPress, you do not have to add threaded comments support to your theme. So if you are already using Disqus or another threaded comment plugin, you can continue to use it without any problem. The issue with built-in threaded comment support is that many of the themes currently in use do not support threaded comments, so there will be a little tweaking neccessary to get it working properly.

'Net Features : wordpress, disqus

Plug Into Better Commenting With Intense Debate

WordPress Gets Threaded Comments