Improving Staticman comments on a Jekyll site
In the months after removing Disqus from my site in favor of a static-based commenting system, Staticman has matured with feature adds like threaded comments and email notifications.
Armed with instructions provided by Eduardo Bouças in this GitHub issue, I set off to level-up the commenting experience on Made Mistakes. Here’s how I did it.
Upgrade to Staticman v2
To take advantage of the new features, it was necessary to migrate Staticman settings from Jekyll’s _config.yml file into a new staticman.yml file1. None of the parameter names changed making the transition to v2 that much easier.
comments:
allowedFields : ['name', 'email', 'url', 'message']
branch : "master"
commitMessage : "New comment."
filename : "comment-{@timestamp}"
format : "yaml"
moderation : true
path : "src/_data/comments/{options.slug}"
requiredFields : ['name', 'email', 'message']
transforms:
email : md5
generatedFields:
date:
type : "date"
options:
format : "iso8601"
Remove/add Staticman as a collaborator
I’m not entirely sure if doing the following was necessary. I encountered errors when submitting test comments and this appeared to solve the problem. It’s possible I mis-configured something else and that was the real issue…
Either way, let me know about your experience upgrading from Staticman v1 to v2 in the comments below.
- Revoked collaboration rights for Staticman
v1by removing from my GitHub repository.
- Added Staticman back as collaborator.
- Pinged the version 2 endpoint
https://api.staticman.net/v2/connect/{your GitHub username}/{your repository name}to accept the collaboration invitation.
Update POST endpoint in comment form
To POST correctly to Staticman, the action attribute in my comment form needed a small update. Changing v1 to v2 in _includes/page__comments.html and appending /comments2 to the end did the trick for me.
<form id="comment-form" class="page__form js-form form" method="post" action="https://api.staticman.net/v2/entry/{{ site.repository }}/{{ site.staticman.branch }}/comments">
Add support for threaded comments
Getting nested comments working was a big pain point for me. Numerous Liquid errors, trying to wrap my head around for loops inside of other for loops, array filters that broke things, and more — took me a bit to figure out.
Add “replying to” identifier
To properly nest replies I needed a way of determining their hierarchy. I went with a field named replying_to and added it as an allowedField to my Staticman config file:
allowedFields: ["name", "email", "url", "message", "replying_to"]
And to my comment form as a hidden field:
<input type="hidden" id="comment-parent" name="fields[replying_to]" value="">
Update Liquid loops
To avoid displaying duplicates, I needed to exclude replies and only top level comments in the main loop. This seemed like the perfect use-case for Jekyll’s where_exp filter:
If the hidden fields[replying_to] field I added to the form was working properly I should have comment data files similar to these:
Parent comment example
message: This is parent comment message.
name: First LastName
email: md5g1bb3r15h
date: '2016-11-30T22:03:15.286Z'
Child comment example
message: This is a child comment message.
name: First LastName
email: md5g1bb3r15h
replying_to: '7'
date: '2016-11-02T05:08:43.280Z'
As you can see above, the “child” comment has replying_to data populated from the hidden fields[replying_to] field in the form. Using this knowledge I tested against it using where_exp:"comment", "comment.replying_to == blank" to create an array of only “top-level” comments.
{% assign comments = site.data.comments[page.slug] | sort | where_exp: "comment", "comment[1].replying_to == blank" %}
{% for comment in comments %}
{% assign avatar = comment[1].avatar %}
{% assign email = comment[1].email %}
{% assign name = comment[1].name %}
{% assign url = comment[1].url %}
{% assign date = comment[1].date %}
{% assign message = comment[1].message %}
{% include comment.html avatar=avatar email=email name=name url=url date=date message=message %}
{% endfor %}
Displaying nested comments
Here is what I was looking to accomplish… before the headaches started.
- Start a loop, and on each iteration create a new array named
replies— of only “reply” comments. - Evaluate the value of
replying_toin these replies. - If
replying_tois equal to the index of the parent loop then it’s a child comment and should be treated as one. - If not, move on to the next entry in the array.
- Rinse and repeat.
I determined the easiest way of assigning a unique identifier to each parent comment would be sequentially. Thankfully Liquid provides a way of doing this with forloop.index.
{% assign index = forloop.index %}
Next I nested a modified copy of the “top-level comment” loop from before inside of itself — to function as the “child” or replies loop.
{% capture i %}{{ include.index }}{% endcapture %}
{% assign replies = site.data.comments[page.slug] | sort | where_exp: "comment", "comment[1].replying_to == i" %}
{% for reply in replies %}
{% assign index = forloop.index | prepend: '-' | prepend: include.index %}
{% assign replying_to = reply[1].replying_to %}
{% assign avatar = reply[1].avatar %}
{% assign email = reply[1].email %}
{% assign name = reply[1].name %}
{% assign url = reply[1].url %}
{% assign date = reply[1].date %}
{% assign message = reply[1].message %}
{% include comment.html index=index replying_to=replying_to avatar=avatar email=email name=name url=url date=date message=message %}
{% endfor %}
Unfortunately the where_exp filter proved troublesome yet again, causing Jekyll to error out with:
Liquid Exception: Liquid error (line 47): Nesting too deep in /_layouts/page.html`.
After brief thoughts of the movie Inception, I applied an inspect filter to help troubleshoot the replies loop. I determined that the where_exp condition was failing3 because I was trying to compare an integer against a string.
To solve this I placed a capture tag around the index variable to convert it from an integer into a string. Then modified the where_exp condition to compare replying_to against this new {{ i }} variable — fixing the issue and allowing me to move on.
{% capture i %}{{ include.index }}{% endcapture %}
{% assign replies = site.data.comments[page.slug] | where_exp:"item", "item.replying_to == i" %}
_includes/page__comments.html
<section class="page__reactions">
{% if site.repository and site.staticman.branch %}
{% if site.data.comments[page.slug] %}
<!-- Start static comments -->
<div id="comments" class="js-comments">
<h2 class="page__section-label">
{% if site.data.comments[page.slug].size > 1 %}
{{ site.data.comments[page.slug] | size }}
{% endif %}
Comments
</h2>
{% assign comments = site.data.comments[page.slug] | sort | where_exp: 'comment', 'comment[1].replying_to == blank' %}
{% for comment in comments %}
{% assign index = forloop.index %}
{% assign replying_to = comment[1].replying_to | to_integer %}
{% assign avatar = comment[1].avatar %}
{% assign email = comment[1].email %}
{% assign name = comment[1].name %}
{% assign url = comment[1].url %}
{% assign date = comment[1].date %}
{% assign message = comment[1].message %}
{% include comment.html index=index replying_to=replying_to avatar=avatar email=email name=name url=url date=date message=message %}
{% endfor %}
</div>
<!-- End static comments -->
{% endif %}
{% unless page.comments_locked == true %}
<!-- Start new comment form -->
<div id="respond">
<h2 class="page__section-label">Leave a Comment <small><a rel="nofollow" id="cancel-comment-reply-link" href="{{ page.url | absolute_url }}#respond" style="display:none;">Cancel reply</a></small></h2>
<form id="comment-form" class="page__form js-form form" method="post" action="https://api.staticman.net/v2/entry/{{ site.repository }}/{{ site.staticman.branch }}/comments">
<fieldset>
<label for="comment-form-message"><strong>Comment</strong> <small>(<a href="https://kramdown.gettalong.org/quickref.html">Markdown</a> is allowed)</small></label>
<textarea type="text" rows="6" id="comment-form-message" name="fields[message]" required spellcheck="true"></textarea>
</fieldset>
<fieldset>
<label for="comment-form-name"><strong>Name</strong></label>
<input type="text" id="comment-form-name" name="fields[name]" required spellcheck="false">
</fieldset>
<fieldset>
<label for="comment-form-email"><strong>Email</strong> <small>(used for <a href="http://gravatar.com">Gravatar</a> image and reply notifications)</small></label>
<input type="email" id="comment-form-email" name="fields[email]" required spellcheck="false">
</fieldset>
<fieldset>
<label for="comment-form-url"><strong>Website</strong> <small>(optional)</small></label>
<input type="url" id="comment-form-url" name="fields[url]"/>
</fieldset>
<fieldset class="hidden" style="display: none;">
<input type="hidden" name="options[origin]" value="{{ page.url | absolute_url }}">
<input type="hidden" name="options[parent]" value="{{ page.url | absolute_url }}">
<input type="hidden" id="comment-replying-to" name="fields[replying_to]" value="">
<input type="hidden" id="comment-post-id" name="options[slug]" value="{{ page.slug }}">
<label for="comment-form-location">Leave blank if you are a human</label>
<input type="text" id="comment-form-location" name="fields[hidden]" autocomplete="off">
</fieldset>
<!-- Start comment form alert messaging -->
<p class="hidden js-notice">
<span class="js-notice-text"></span>
</p>
<!-- End comment form alert messaging -->
<fieldset>
<label for="comment-form-reply">
<input type="checkbox" id="comment-form-reply" name="options[subscribe]" value="email">
Notify me of replies by email.
</label>
<button type="submit" id="comment-form-submit" class="btn btn--large">Submit Comment</button>
</fieldset>
</form>
</div>
<!-- End new comment form -->
{% else %}
<p><em>Comments are closed. If you have a question concerning the content of this page, please feel free to <a href="/contact/">contact me</a>.</em></p>
{% endunless %}
{% endif %}
</section>
_includes/comment.html
<article id="comment{% unless include.r %}{{ index | prepend: '-' }}{% else %}{{ include.index | prepend: '-' }}{% endunless %}" class="js-comment comment {% if include.name == site.author.name %}admin{% endif %} {% unless include.replying_to == 0 %}child{% endunless %}">
<div class="comment__avatar">
{% if include.avatar %}
<img src="{{ include.avatar }}" alt="{{ include.name | escape }}">
{% elsif include.email %}
<img src="https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/{{ include.email }}?d=mm&s=60" srcset="https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/{{ include.email }}?d=mm&s=120 2x" alt="{{ include.name | escape }}">
{% else %}
<img src="/assets/images/avatar-60.png" srcset="/assets/images/avatar-120.png 2x" alt="{{ include.name | escape }}">
{% endif %}
</div>
<h3 class="comment__author-name">
{% unless include.url == blank %}
<a rel="external nofollow" href="{{ include.url }}">
{% if include.name == site.author.name %}<svg class="icon" width="20px" height="20px"><use xlink:href="#icon-mistake"></use></svg> {% endif %}{{ include.name }}
</a>
{% else %}
{% if include.name == site.author.name %}<svg class="icon" width="20px" height="20px"><use xlink:href="#icon-mistake"></use></svg> {% endif %}{{ include.name }}
{% endunless %}
</h3>
<div class="comment__timestamp">
{% if include.date %}
{% if include.index %}<a href="#comment{% if r %}{{ index | prepend: '-' }}{% else %}{{ include.index | prepend: '-' }}{% endif %}" title="path to this comment">{% endif %}
<time datetime="{{ include.date | date_to_xmlschema }}">{{ include.date | date: '%B %d, %Y' }}</time>
{% if include.index %}</a>{% endif %}
{% endif %}
</div>
<div class="comment__content">
{{ include.message | markdownify }}
</div>
{% unless include.replying_to != 0 or page.comments_locked == true %}
<div class="comment__reply">
<a rel="nofollow" class="btn" href="#comment-{{ include.index }}" onclick="return addComment.moveForm('comment-{{ include.index }}', '{{ include.index }}', 'respond', '{{ page.slug }}')">Reply to {{ include.name }}</a>
</div>
{% endunless %}
</article>
{% capture i %}{{ include.index }}{% endcapture %}
{% assign replies = site.data.comments[page.slug] | sort | where_exp: 'comment', 'comment[1].replying_to == i' %}
{% for reply in replies %}
{% assign index = forloop.index | prepend: '-' | prepend: include.index %}
{% assign replying_to = reply[1].replying_to | to_integer %}
{% assign avatar = reply[1].avatar %}
{% assign email = reply[1].email %}
{% assign name = reply[1].name %}
{% assign url = reply[1].url %}
{% assign date = reply[1].date %}
{% assign message = reply[1].message %}
{% include comment.html index=index replying_to=replying_to avatar=avatar email=email name=name url=url date=date message=message %}
{% endfor %}
Comment reply HTML and JavaScript
Next up was to add some finishing touches to pull everything together.
Familiar with the way Wordpress handles reply forms I looked to it for inspiration. Digging through the JavaScript in wp-includes/js/comment-reply.js I found everything I could possibly need:
respondfunction to move form into viewcancelfunction to destroy a reply form a return it to its original state- pass parent’s unique identifier to
fields[replying_to]on form submit
To start I used an unless condition to only show reply links on “top-level” comments. I planned on going one-level deep with replies, so this seemed like a good way of enforcing that.
{% unless r %}
<div class="comment__reply">
<a rel="nofollow" class="btn" href="#comment-{{ include.index }}">
Reply to {{ include.name }}
</a>
</div>
{% endunless %}
To give the reply link life I added the following onclick attribute and JavaScript to it.
onclick="return addComment.moveForm('comment-{{ include.index }}', '{{ include.index }}', 'respond', '{{ page.slug }}')"
A few minor variable name changes to Wordpress’ comment-reply.js script was all it took to get everything working with my form markup.
Hitting a reply button moves the comment form into view and populates <input type='hidden' id='comment-replying-to' name='fields[replying_to]' value=''> with the correct parent value. While tapping Cancel reply returns the input to its original state of null.
Add support for email notifications
Compared to nesting comment replies, email notifications were a breeze to setup.
Update staticman.yml configuration
To ensure that links in notification emails are safe and only come from trusted domains, set allowedOrigins accordingly.
Example:
allowedOrigins: ["mademistakes.com"]
The domain(s) allowed here must match those passed from an options.origin field we’re going to add in the next step. Only domains that match will trigger notifications to send, otherwise the operation will abort.
Update comment form
To finish, add the following three fields to the comment form.
Field 1 + 2: Hidden input fields that pass the origin4 set in staticman.yml and unique identifier to the entry the user is subscriber to:
<input type="hidden" name="options[origin]" value="{{ page.url | absolute_url }}">
<input type="hidden" name="options[parent]" value="{{ page.url | absolute_url }}">
Field 3: A checkbox input for subscribing to email notifications.
<label for="comment-form-reply">
<input type="checkbox" id="comment-form-reply" name="options[subscribe]" value="email">
Notify me of new comments by email.
</label>
Nothing fancy here, name=options[subscribe] and value="email" are added to the field to associate subscription data with email address.
If setup correctly a user should receive an email anytime a new comment on the post or page they subscribed to is merged in.
Example of a Staticman New reply email notification:
Well there you have it, a static-based commenting system done up in Jekyll that handles nested comments and reply notifications. Now if I could only shave a minute of my build time to get new comments merged in quicker…
An added benefit of the new configuration file means you can use Staticman with other static site generators.
v2no longer requires you to use a Jekyll specific_config.ymlfile. ↩︎Site properties are optional. See Staticman documentation for details on hooking up your forms. ↩︎
15is not the same as'15'. Those single quotes make a world of difference… ↩︎This URL will be included in the notification email sent to subscribers, allowing them to open the page directly. ↩︎
53 comments
Thanks for writing the steps in such details. I think yours is the only blog that has been laying out the details of using Staticman as the experience that followed.
Your website is one of the most, if not the most articulate example of web design I have come across, both aesthetically and technically. You are always constantly redesigning and improving this site, playing with cutting edge tech. I can only imagine what else happens before generating the site. :)
How much time do you spend coding this site on average? If you do not mind me asking of course. I am asking because I am currently scared of the level of commitment that is required to treat your website as a piece of art….
This comment became so lengthy that I emailed you the rest.
Wow, this looks amazing! I’m definitely going to check it out…I’ll be launching a new Jekyll-powered magazine soon and have considered comments but I definitely want to avoid Disqus if possible.
If you added up all the time I’ve spent on the site over the years it’s probably a 💩 ton! Writing articles definitely eats up most of the time. It takes me forever to write even the simplest post… which is why I don’t post all that often.
Articles of this length tend to take me 5–20 hours to produce over the course of a week or two. Just from all the distractions and other commitments in my life… can be hard to focus on a single thing at once.
The design and layout stuff comes much faster. I’m constantly making small adjustments as I experiment with new things. I don’t get too hung up if I break something here, it’s one big learning experience for me.
To speed up the build time I used a Docker image in Travis. With this I don’t have to wait for the installation of all Jekyll dependencies.
The size is WIP but you can get some ideas from my Travis config, and Dockerfile.
How many posts do you have? Having close to 1,000 posts I’ve found they bog things down way more than installing dependencies ever could.
Found this article that introduced me to the idea of having Jekyll do less and use Gulp to do some of the heavy lifting (preprocessing Sass, concatenating/minifying JS, optimizing images, minifying HTML, etc.) instead
Was able to shave a few minutes off the build time doing just that. It complicates the build process slightly but has the advantage of not being as reliant on Jekyll — if I ever decide to switch to a different static site generator.
Thank you for this article. It’s awesome, I have successfully added static comments to jekyll. I noticed that you do not use Akismet. Is there any reason for this?
I tried enabling Akismet with the following but it never quite worked:
Were you able to get it working?
From this line in Staticman’s documenation I got the feeling the public instance of Staticman needed it setup. Wasn’t sure if that was the case or if it was only for those running their own instances of the app.
Hi Michael.
Any chance you’re going to update minimal-mistakes to support the new staticman features like threading and reply notification? You’re Jekyll-fu is stronger than mine.
I’d like to. Just need to give it some thought so I can come up with a way to support the new stuff in Staticman while maintaining backwards compatibility.
There are some changes needed to use v2 which could break things for those who don’t update to the new
staticman.ymlconfig.I have a hosting provider for my site and Looking to migrate from Disqus. Is a GitHub repo required? Can this be setup using Minimal Mistakes and not on GitHub Pages?
Yes a GitHub repo is required for Staticman to work. It needs collaboration access to the repo to create pull requests against it to add the comment
_datafiles. You don’t have to host your site with GitHub Pages though.I host with Media Temple but have my repo on GH. The workflow goes something like: new comment submitted > Staticman creates a pull request to add to site’s repo > merge pull request > re-build site > deploy.
Depending on how you deploy your site some of this may vary slightly. Previously I was building locally each time I merged in a new comment then rsync’d the contents of
_siteto my hosting. Now I use Travis CI to build my site after merges and it handles the deployments automatically.And yes, Minimal Mistakes supports Staticman comments. I haven’t updated it to support
v2that can handle replies and comment notifications. But that shouldn’t be too hard for you to tackle if you follow what I did in this post.I now have Travis configured. I can display old Disqus comments, now to figure out how to post comments!
Success. I now have parent/child comments using Staticman v2 and Travis.
Last step is the Mailgun integration.
Public Test website: Macworld 2010 Pictures
Nice! FYI when I hit your site I’m getting warnings in Chrome related to SSL. Not sure if something is up with your certificate or what.
I have been trying to update my copy of Minimal Mistakes with this. I have it almost working but the jQuery. How do you get the function to hook into the form so it does not redirect the user?
Have a look at Justin’s repo. He has Staticman
v2working with Minimal Mistakes.Thanks, I got it working with some amount of my changes plus his.
Still can’t get Mailgun to work.
Nice tutorial. Thanks.
You said you got comment notifications working… I’m going to test them out here and see if I get notified. I’ve been trying to get this working on my own site and don’t understand how the two uses of
options[parent]don’t conflict.My understanding is
options[parent]areoptions[origin]are two different things, the later used to track which thread you’re currently subscribed to. But not entirely sure if that’s how it works since I haven’t had a lot of luck fully testing email notifications.Let me know if you get a notification once this comment is merged in and posted.
Can I know when timestamp value is made in comment data file? It is hard to check it but looks important to show the comment order correctly.
The timestamp is appended to the data file by Staticman when its received. You have to enable it in your config under the
generatedFieldsarray. There’s a couple of different formats you can use… I went withiso8601.How do you apply reCaptcha for staticman? Now it is always showing “Missing reCAPTCHA API credentials” I encrypted secret using staticman.
I had the same issue. Apparently there was an API change with the latest release of Staticman. In the form, changing
options[reCaptcha][encryptedSecret]tooptions[reCaptcha][secret]fixed it for me.There’s an open issue on the Staticman repo if that doesn’t end up solving it for you.
Fixed. Thanks for comment. =)
Michael, please, can you explain the
page__commentssnippet? If it just checks if the parent isnil, how does it display all comments? (I’m definitely missing something obvious here, but hey, it’s 1 AM).Thanks for the tutorial! One tip though: the required fields should have a
requiredattribute. You know, for accessibility :) .Sure thing. That first
assignis creating an array of comments that don’t have areplying_tofield. That’s what thenilis checking since through some trial and error I learned that areplying_tofield is only added to a child comment’s data file.Inside the first loop I check the current comment’s value against all comment’s
replying_tofields, if they match then they’re a child and spit out as a nested entry in the second loop.Does that help clear things up?
And good catch on the
requiredattribute, completely missed that.Staticman recently added support for reCAPTCHA which has completely eliminated all of the spam comments that would slip through. I’m sure Akismet would have done the same, but since it’s not enabled for the public instance of Staticman this was the next best thing.
This is really helpful thanks.
How did you apply mail notification? I already encrypted api key and domain correctly, though not having luck until now.
I use the public instance of Staticman which means I didn’t have to create my own Mailgun account and encrypt keys. I didn’t have much luck getting it to work which is why I went that way.
I don’t know many people who have gotten it to work. Might be worth pinging this thread as you’re certainly not alone in trying to get it up and running.
It looks it is impossible to implement public instance of mailgun for now, sadly.
Extremely helpful. Thank you.
Hey Michael, I could use some help here. The below line is always assigning comments variable as blank.
If I do an inspect
I get this
Other than that, all the settings are exactly the same, except for file name and the date format.
Add an
inspecton thecommentsarray instead, since that will be the new array that is filtering out replies withwhere_exp.For comparison this is an example of what I get:
Did that as well, and all I get is
OK.. So I sort of figured out where the problem lies… While the
where_expis not working for me as it does for you, I had to take a different approach.Are you using replies on your site? You might run into problems eliminating the
wherefilter since that first loop will include parent comments along with their children (the replies).I had a hell of a time getting it to filter out properly. The
whereandwhere_expfilters seem to be really picky if your data array doesn’t match. It all comes down to how your data files are constructed. Perhaps yours are slightly different than mine.Ultimately it boiled down to the fact that since
where_expwas not working for me. With my approach I was receiving each comment as below. Hence the need to use[1].It seems to be working with replies as well without anything breaking, so far. Fingers crossed. I will know once i go live. Thank you for all your help.
Hi, I’m really keen to try out Staticman.
Is there a tool to import Blogger comments to Staticman/GitHub or any suggestions on how I could go about doing so?
Thanks for sharing all this wonderful information.
I used this set of Rake tasks to export comments in Disqus to use with Staticman. Perhaps it can be modified to do the same with Blogger.
Blogger lets you export your blog into an XML file which you could probably pull data out of. Not sure if it includes all the comments though. Jekyll has a Blogger import tool so perhaps you can get some ideas from that?
Thanks a lot, Michael. I managed to get the comments imported. I first imported the comments from Blogger to Disqus, and then used your approach to export them out of Disqus.
I’m now on to configuring reply-to. I managed to get it to work but running into an issue. When running in production mode, my comments are appearing in the correct order but when running on localhost, they are order is different and the reply is showing up under the wrong parent. It seems that the order in which the comments are being returned are different on localhost and production. Any idea why that would happen?
I’m also not sure why you are not using the unique id of the parent as the reply-to value on the child to guarantee that the child is attached to the correct parent.
Thanks.
Great!
Not sure what could be going on with the comment order. I’ve heard of others having the same issue so you’re not alone. If you’re using the same instance of Jekyll to build and serve then the output should be exactly the same. If you’re using some sort of CI service to build/deploy your site then it’s possible the environments and Jekyll versions are out of sync and that’s the issue.
I am using unique id’s to attach child comments to their parent by using the
replying_tofield. There’s a chance my code above is old and outdated. If you haven’t already, reference my GitHub repo instead since that is the actual code I use to build comments on my site._includes/comments.html_includes/comment.htmlI really appreciate your help.
You are right that I’m using a CI service, but after some more testing, I found that the ordering of replies is completely unpredictable and it is changing both on my local and on the production. I’m on the latest version of Jekyll (3.5). Maybe that’s causing the difference. BTW, I have been using the latest code from your GH repo.
So I made a minor modification to your code to use the parent’s
_idfield as the replying-to value of the child, instead of relying on the position of the comments (because that seems to be unpredictable at least in my environment). Now it seems to be working consistently.I’m yet to get into reply notifications and MailGun setup. If I run into any issues, I may seek your help again.
I must say that your 2 blog posts on Staticman have been extremely helpful. Without your posts I may not have even made a serious attempt at it.
I don’t have enough words to thank you!"
There’s one more thing I forgot about that I didn’t write up in the posts. If you have a page with imported Disqus comments (using the Rake task) and new ones from Staticman the order will be wrong because of filename differences.
What’s going on is the order is determined by the comment data files’ filenames. The data files created from the Disqus import use a different format (ISO 8601) than the ones Staticman generates (UNIX timestamp in milliseconds). I fixed that by renaming all of my Disqus comment filenames to match.
What you could do is modify the script to use a Unix time format (not
YYYY-MM-DD) or change Staticman’sfilenameconfig to use something other than the default{@timestamp}placeholder.If you’re looking for help with getting Mailgun notifications working I’d check out Staticman’s repo. I’m using the public instance so no issues really for me, but I know a lot of people have had problems getting it to work. You’ll likely find more guidance on this issue’s thread than from me.
Michael, thanks a ton for this post! I used it as the base for my own implementation. Some things I had to change:
"item.replying_to == ''"rather than"item.replying_to == blank"{% assign comments = site.data.comments[page.slug] | where_exp:"item", "item.replying_to == ''" | sort: 'date' %}rather than{% assign comments = site.data.comments[page.slug] | where_exp:"item", "item.replying_to == blank" %}as even though I followed your comment naming convention, posts were being sorted in reverse alphabetical order so the replies were showing under the wrong parent comment. Now that I think about it maybe | reverse would work the same as | sortdatein my case.I also tried to use the comment
_idfield as the “link” between child and parent rather than the for loop index, but I kept getting errors about ’nesting too deep’. I feel like using the_idfield would be better though as then sorting the comments by date or some other parameter would become doable. What do you think?If it piques your curiosity in the very least, in my
_includesfolder I have your same three files (comments, comment, and comment-form) and in my_layoutsfolder indefault.htmlin a script tag at the bottom of the file I have the js code for the replies. Thanks again!"Thanks for sharing! I’ve heard from a few people that they had to modify the
forloop to get the nested order sorted out. Something not mentioned in this post is I did some additional cleanup on my comment data (see this reply).Some of the variation might have to do with your comment data too and how Liquid conditionals are met. Truthy/falsy values for strings, integers, arrays, etc. are different.
I encountered the same
nesting too deeperrors as I tried a million different combinations of Jekyll’swhereandwhere_expfilters. There have been some updates Jekyll so maybe it’s worth revisiting.Thanks, Michael.
You are right that Disqus comments and staticman comments have different file naming conventions, but I haven’t encountered any issue with that. I use the date inside each comment file to sort the comments in the right order. So, file name doesn’t seem to matter much.
I do have 2 questions for you -
Thanks again.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the script getting flagged by page speed testers — the scores they assign aren’t as black and white as they make it seem. It’s being loaded asynchronously and I haven’t seen it hurt my pages much if any.
The honeypot method is too easy for bots to spoof. They eventually learn what the hidden field is that you’re trying to fool them with. I was getting over 10 spam comments a day on my posts. Turning on reCAPTCHA I get maybe 2 a week. Spam that slips through is usually people manually trying to stuff a comment with their links, on posts like this that tend to rank well in search.
Reply notifications are totally something that could be abused. You’re right someone could easily put any email address they wanted into the form. I believe I saw someone over in Staticman’s issues on GitHub voiced the same concern and suggesting some sort of double opt’in feature.
Regardless I believe the notification emails that come from Staticman have an unsubscribe link, so it should be easy enough to stop them.
Thanks, Michael. I’m going to first re-enable Recaptcha as I don’t think the honey pot is sweet enough. About reply notification, I guess you are right that the unsubscribe option should mitigate the risk. I’ll give it a shot and see how it goes.
One other thought I had was to make use of browser local storage to store commenter’s Name, Email and Website so that return visitors who have commented before do not have to type those details again (as long as they don’t clear their cache). What do you think about that?
Many thanks for this article. After Pooleapp died I thought I was sentenced to Disqus again. Staticman to the rescue !!