[nodebb-plugin-blog-comments] Blog Commenting Engine (Ghost, Wordpress widget)

psychobunny

NodeBB Blog Comments

Lets NodeBB act as a comments engine/widget for your blog. Currently supports both Ghost and WordPress. There is a separate repo for PencilBlue support. If you'd like to see support for other CMS/blog systems, please submit an issue on our tracker.

The comments are exposed to any plugin you have built into the core, so it is completely possible to have emoticons, embedded video, and/or whatever else you want in the comments section of your blog.

Articles are published to a forum category of your choice, and will gain a tag that links it back to the original article.

What's new in 0.8x

The WP-JSON plugin is no longer required. This plugin will now use the built-in JSON API.
The comments snippet has changed, please update your integration code as necessary
Fixed a bug that caused errors when no ACAO header was defined

Upgrading to 0.6x

Getting Unexpected end of JSON input for /comments/publish? On your blog's post template (ex. post.hbs for Ghost) where you have installed the blog comments script, find the following line:

<script id="nbb-markdown" type="text/markdown">{{../post.markdown}}</script>

and above, add:

<script id="nbb-title" type="text/markdown">{{../post.title}}</script>

What's new in 0.3x

Fixed quite a few server crashes (especially when publishing)
Compatible with NodeBB 0.6x+ and Ghost 0.5.10
Added tags support for Ghost
Added comment support in general

Screenshots

blog comments

Installation

First install the plugin:

npm install nodebb-plugin-blog-comments

Activate the plugin in the ACP and reboot NodeBB. Head over to the Blog Comments section in the ACP and select the Category ID you'd like to publish your blog content to (default is Category 1). Make sure you put the correct URL to your blog.

Ghost Installation

Paste this any where in yourtheme/post.hbs, somewhere between {{#post}} and {{/post}}. All you have to edit is line 3 (nbb.url) - put the URL to your NodeBB forum's home page here.

<a id="nodebb-comments"></a>
<script type="text/javascript">
var nbb = {};
nbb.url = '//your.nodebb.com'; // EDIT THIS
nbb.cid = 1;	// OPTIONAL. Forces a Category ID in NodeBB.
				//  Omit it to fallback to specified IDs in the admin panel.

(function() {
nbb.articleID = '{{../post.id}}';
nbb.tags = [{{#../post.tags}}"{{name}}",{{/../post.tags}}];
nbb.script = document.createElement('script'); nbb.script.type = 'text/javascript'; nbb.script.async = true;
nbb.script.src = nbb.url + '/plugins/nodebb-plugin-blog-comments/lib/ghost.js';
(document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(nbb.script);
})();
</script>
<script id="nbb-title" type="text/markdown">{{../post.title}}</script>
<script id="nbb-markdown" type="text/markdown">{{../post.markdown}}</script>
<noscript>Please enable JavaScript to view comments</noscript>

If you wish, you can move <a id="nodebb-comments"></a> to where you want to place the actual comments widget.

Wordpress Installation

Replace the contents of /wp-content/themes/YOUR_THEME/comments.php with the following (back-up the old comments.php, just in case):

<?php
if ( post_password_required() )
	return;
?>

<a id="nodebb-comments"></a>
<script type="text/javascript">
	const nodeBBURL = '//your.nodebb.com';
	const wordpressURL = '<?php get_site_url(); ?>';
	const articleID = \''.get_the_ID().'\';
	const categoryID = null; 	// OPTIONAL. Forces a Category ID in NodeBB.
								//  Omit it to fallback to specified IDs in the admin panel.

	(function() {
	var nbb = document.createElement('script'); nbb.type = 'text/javascript'; nbb.async = true;
	nbb.src = nodeBBURL + '/plugins/nodebb-plugin-blog-comments/lib/wordpress.js';
	(document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(nbb);
	})();
</script>
<noscript>Please enable JavaScript to view comments</noscript>

General - PHP example

Paste this any where that you want load commenting system. All you have to edit is line 3 (nodeBBURL) - put the URL to your NodeBB forum's home page here. You can also use any template engine (hbs, eco...) instead of PHP.

	<a id="nodebb-comments"></a>
	<script type="text/javascript">
	var nodeBBURL = '//your.nodebb.com',

	<?php
		echo "articleID = " .getId().";";
		$obj = new stdClass();
		$obj->title_plain = "";
		$obj->url="";
		$obj->tags = [];
		$obj->markDownContent= "";
		$obj->cid = 1; // OPTIONAL. Forces a Category ID in NodeBB.
						// Omit it to fallback to specified IDs in the admin panel.
		echo "var articleData =" .json_encode($obj).";";
	?>

	(function() {
	var nbb = document.createElement('script'); nbb.type = 'text/javascript'; nbb.async = true;
	nbb.src = nodeBBURL + '/plugins/nodebb-plugin-blog-comments/lib/generalphp.js';
	(document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(nbb);
	})();
	</script>
	<noscript>Please enable JavaScript to view comments</noscript>

You must have some getId() function on your website, for example:

For a PHP website

    <?php
        function getId(){
            $id = 0;
            // unique id for each page of your website
            return $id;
        }
    ?>

If you don't have such ID, you can use this function that generates a unique ID from the URL:

    <?php
        function getId(){
            return stringToInteger($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
        }
        function stringToInteger($string) {
            $string = md5($string);
            $output = '1';
            for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($string); $i++) {
                $output .= (string) ord($string[$i]);
            }
            return (int) $output;
        }
    ?>

Comments Counter

You may optionally put a "# of comments" counter anywhere on the page with the following code:

<span id="nodebb-comments-count"></span> Comments

A mechanism to query the number of comments on another separate page will be available in a future release.

Author and Category information

To use NodeBB's category and author information (instead of using Ghost's user/tag system), there are two elements that this plugin searches for:

Published by <span id="nodebb-comments-author"></span> in <span id="nodebb-comments-category"></span>

Publishing

Head over to the article that you'd like to publish. The code will detect if you're both an administrator of your blog and NodeBB (so ensure that you're logged into both) and will display a publish button if so.

You may also create a publishers group in NodeBB to allow a group of regular users to have publish rights.

Multiple blogs

You may use a comma-separated entry of blogs in the ACP to support publishing from a network of separate blogs to your forum. You can also choose to put each blog in its own dedicated category, or place them all into one category.

Sites using this plugin

NodeBB's Blog (Wordpress).
The Unknown Artist Hour (Ghost).
Strange Adventures In (Ghost).
V2MM (Ghost).

Please submit a PR to add your site here

TODO

Republishing (for now you can just edit both the article and the published blog).
Pull CSS files from appropriate plugins? Ability to load custom CSS to style widget.

julian

All kinds of awesome We'll be testing this over the weekend on this forum, and if all goes well, we'll make more official announcements

Bri

Awesome work @psychobunny! I've been checking Ghost out too, and was planning on hosting it, and attaching SOME sort of commenting system... it's like you guys are reading my mind sometimes

bentael

handlebars +1

Schamper

Very nice!

toolito

Nice !
I'll probably use it !

jtarjanyi

Im waiting for the WP version. If it will be available should I use it for Worldpress hosted blog or I need own hosted WP?

psychobunny

You'd need your own hosted WP (I'm assuming you can't modify the template's source code on their hosted service, can you?)

jtarjanyi

@psychobunny said:

You'd need your own hosted WP (I'm assuming you can't modify the template's source code on their hosted service, can you?)

Some part could be modified (eg. headers, and CSS). I not sure this is enough.

psychobunny

Does the Custom Design upgrade let me edit HTML?
No. The Custom Design upgrade allows you to edit fonts, colors, and CSS only. You can change the appearance of a theme, but not its HTML markup or PHP code.

Yeah you're right, sorry. You'd have to host it yourself. Why not host your WP and NodeBB on the same server?

Chris

Why couldn't this be an all in one plugin package? Kind of like the Disqus plugin?

psychobunny

Because AFAIK disqus comments lives on the actual blog page itself; it doesn't publish the OP to a forum (ie. Disqus isn't actually a forum software but a commenting software).

The changing parts are the mechanism for pulling markdown/html from the blog's API and submitting it to NodeBB to publish. Should be straightforward to that part for other blog software I just need the time

Chris

Disqus comments live on Disqus - they only "sync" to the blog if you want them to. It wouldn't be hard to have a plugin push the post to an "api" of sorts (ie nodebb) via plugin, though.

jtarjanyi

@psychobunny said:

Does the Custom Design upgrade let me edit HTML?
No. The Custom Design upgrade allows you to edit fonts, colors, and CSS only. You can change the appearance of a theme, but not its HTML markup or PHP code.

Yeah you're right, sorry. You'd have to host it yourself. Why not host your WP and NodeBB on the same server?

If WP version will be ready I will try to create an own hosted copy of the current blog, however never tried install an maintain WP before, but it coulld be an good chalange

finid

@jtarjanyi

If you really want to a self-hosted WP blog and you can afford $5/month for a Cloud server, I could help you set one up.

jtarjanyi

@planner Thanks. I'm currently using digitalocean's droplets. It is cheap, reliable, fast, and has good additional features like daily backup, and snapshot.

Roger

Would doing a user database sync be possible? So that you could like accounts between ghost and nodeBB instead of checking if someone's an admin of both?

psychobunny

Not today. Ghost has a long way to go in terms of development - if you see their ACP you can tell that they are missing a lot. And more importantly, Ghost is currently single account only; they do not have multiple sign-ups yet.

When the time comes, I'm down for writing a deeper integration

Sp4rkR4t

@psychobunny Tried adding this but when I click the publish button on my ghost blog nodebb crashes. this is what gets spat out from nodebb.

/var/nodebb/node_modules/redis/index.js:535
throw err;
^
TypeError: string is not a function
at Object.Topics.post (/var/nodebb/src/topics.js:90:11)
at /var/nodebb/node_modules/nodebb-plugin-blog-comments/library.js:96:11
at /var/nodebb/src/database/redis.js:317:4
at try_callback (/var/nodebb/node_modules/redis/index.js:532:9)
at RedisClient.return_reply (/var/nodebb/node_modules/redis/index.js:614:13)

at HiredisReplyParser.<anonymous> (/var/nodebb/node_modules/redis/index.js:2
66:14)
at HiredisReplyParser.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:95:17)
at HiredisReplyParser.execute (/var/nodebb/node_modules/redis/lib/parser/hir
edis.js:43:18)
at RedisClient.on_data (/var/nodebb/node_modules/redis/index.js:488:27)
at Socket.<anonymous> (/var/nodebb/node_modules/redis/index.js:82:14)

julian

Hey @sp4rkr4t, we're aware of the issue, we'll fix it up sometime today I think...