Simple comments

This is a plugin for Pelican that manages comments as simple files. Comments are generated along with the page.

Usage

Enable this plugin in your pelicanconf.py like this

PLUGIN_PATHS = [ '/path/to/checkout/of/simple_comments' ]
PLUGINS = [ 'simple_comments' ]

Configure the location of your comments folder in your pelicanconf.py. If you use just a folder name here, the path will be relative to your pelicanconf.py.

COMMENT_PATH = '/path/to/your/comments'

Update your theme to include the comments on each page

{% if article.comments %}
    {% for comment in article.comments %}
        <div>{{ comment.Author }}</div>
        <div>{{ comment.Date }}</div>
        <div>{{ comment.text }}</div>
    {% endfor %}
{% endif %}

Comment format

Inside COMMENT_PATH, comments are organized in a directory structure. Each directory represents a blog post, comments are stored as individual files

/comments
├── blog-post1
│   ├── comment1
│   └── comment2
│── blog-post2
└   └── comment1

Each blog post begins with metadata, followed by an empty line and finally the comment itself

Author: the-author@test.com
Date: 2001-01-01 12:00:00

this is a very sensible blog post comment

Creating comments

The plugin doesn't care how comments are created as long as they follow the directory structure and file format specified above. Note especially the date format used - the plugin expects exactly this format.

I use a simple PHP script (see the php folder) to create the comments but any other means will do, too.

Turning off comments

The plugin adds an allowcomments key to each article's metadata. As comments are enabled by default, its value is True. If you want to turn off comments for a certain article, specify AllowComments with value False in the article's metadata.

Captchas

To provide some safety against comment spam this repository contains another plugin, pelicaptcha. It generates a captcha image along with each article and a file named captchas that contains each article's slug and the challenge that was used to generate the image separated by a tab character.

Dependencies

This plugin depends on wheezy.captcha (which in turn depends on PIL). Make sure you install both modules before using the plugin.

Usage

You should generate the captcha image into each page, like this:

<form action="http://...." method="POST">
    <input type="hidden" name="Slug" value="{{ article.slug }}">
    Captcha: <img src="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ article.slug }}.jpg">
    <input type="text" name="Challenge">
</form>

The script that's used to store the comment can then validate the comment:

1. extract the Challenge and Slug request parameters
2. read through the captchas file searching for the matching slug
3. compare the Challenge request parameter with the slug from the file

The simple PHP script (in the php folder) shows an example of the validation.