cl/plugins/pelican_comments

pelican-comments

This is a plugin for pelican to provide static comments.

It was inspired by a similar plugin for Jekyll.

How It Works

When enabled, the plugin searches a comments directory in your pelican tree. In that directory, there is one file per comment. Each comment file has a post_id attribute with the slug of the post to which the comment belongs. The article template will receive a comments attribute which contains the list of comments on the post.

Installation

Pelican-comments is not part of the default pelican distribution.

In your settings.py, add:

PLUGINS = ['pelican_comments']
COMMENTS_DIR = ['comments'] # Optional: 'comments' is the default
ARTICLE_EXCLUDES = ['comments', 'pages'] # Optional: Stops pelican trying to validate comments as articles

In your template, add:

{% if article.comments %}
    <h2>Comments</h2>
    <ul>
      {% for comment in article.comments %}
        <li>
          <p>{{ comment.author }} said, on {{ comment.date }}:</p>
          {{ comment.content }}
        </li>
      {% endfor %}
    </ul>
{% endif %}

In your pelican tree, create a comments directory. Add one file per comment on your blog. Make sure that each comment file has a post_id attribute to tie it to a post. You can also include the comments' authors and date/time. For example:

post_id: one-of-my-post-slugs
Author: some random guy
Date: 2019-09-27 18:44

This is a test.

It doesn't matter what the files are named.

How to mention a user ?

Because there is not JavaScript in the comment system. Mentioning a user can be something difficult, however we just have to place a link at the beginning of the comment, here I show an example:

:::bash
[@snowden](#comment-snowden-20121118-20:14:50)
Reply message.

where:

• #comment-snowden-20121118-20:14:50 is the comment id of the user to respond.

Example folder structure

.
└── comments
    └── foo-bar
    │   ├── 1.md
    │   └── 0.md
    └── some-other-slug
        ├── random-Name.md
        ├── 1.md
        └── 0.md

Generating the Comment Files

Script for processing a comment submission form coming soon.

Script to import comments from a wordpress export file coming soon.

See also this php script, which should be relatively easy to hack into submission. More discussion in this blog post.

You'll need some kind of workflow to allow you to move comments from email or other holding area (I plan to use the filesystem on the webhost) to your pelican tree.