I was recently asked to look at the Disqus plugin for WordPress for a client. I teally like to use a product myself before recommending it to a client – even the ones they bring to me… so after looking at Disqus, I thought I qould give it a whirl.
I had seen it previously and ignored it – as another fad and I’m kinda sad I did. It looks incredibly powerful – and dead easy to implement on your blog. I use a modified Woo theme on my site, and had to make one tweak to the style sheet for the comments to display the way I wanted them.
WHAT IS DISQUS
Disqus is a better comment system for your site. It provides a way to manage a discussion community – I like that word, community. I can see this can have applications for a membership site.
Connect Your Conversations
As our communities become wide spread, discussions that relate to our sites or membership sites can happen anywhere. I know that I have seen a conversation start with a series of blog comments, head off to twitter and develop further and then end up on a Facebook page….
Not to mention the Friendfeed connection, Diggs and other reactions from Social Bookmarking sites.
Disqus lets you display all these reactions and discussions in one place.
Give Your Community Members The Power To Choose Their Identity
Disqus allows commenters to choose which identity they want to use – Facebook, OpenID, Twitter….
Other Features:
- Threaded Comments – display your comments in a thread, just like a live discussion.
- Flexible display order – Popular Now, Newest or Oldest first, Highighted, Best (comments with the most likes)
- Automatic closing of comments
- Moderation (a big one!)
- Integration with Akismet
- Customizable Comment Count – I don’t like Comments, so I use Discussions…
Spread the Discussion
Every time someone leaves a comment, they can easily share the
discussion happening on your site to friends and followers.
Accelerate the distribution of your content by observing how
effectively word travels across the Facebook Newsfeed and Twitter
stream. This is pretty powerful stuff – making it easy to share the discussion amongst other communities.
There’s a heap more but I encourage you to try it on your site – see how it improves your visibility to your community.
Learn more at Disqus Comments – https://disqus.com and find the plugin for your WordPress website at: https://wordpress.org/extend/pl…..nt-system/ (although once you sign up for a disqus id, they’ll walk you through the process)
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