WebHelp with User Comments

[Tim Green]

The IntenseDebate blog commenting system is easy to implement and works very nicely with Help & Manual's WebHelp with just a couple of small tweaks. I've set up a sample version of the Help & Manual help with activated comments here on the forum website:

Sample WebHelp with User Comments

If enough people are interested I can post a tutorial explaining how to get this set up for your own WebHelp output. Using IntenseDebate as your comment system has a number of benefits:

• You don't have to set up your own login or user database system. Users can log in with their Facebook, Twitter or OpenID accounts, or they can register for an IntenseDebate account, which will automatically be linked to your site when they do this.
• You can also allow guest comments, either moderated or unmoderated. If they're moderated you get to check them before they become visible. You can also set this option for all comments.
• The system includes the excellent Wordpress Akismet spam filter, which is very effective at stopping spam comments.
• You can leverage social sites to get additional exposure for your documentation if this is appropriate for your needs.
• The comments are separate from your WebHelp, linked to topics by the topic IDs. This means you can update, recompile, restructure and re-upload your help without losing your comments. You just have to be careful not to change your topic IDs.
• The commenting system is extensively customizable via the administrator dashboard on your IntenseDebate account page.
• You can add commenting to any number of WebHelp sites and administrate them all via your IntenseDebate account.
• You can download and export all the comments for your site(s) in XML for backups and further processing.

What may be a negative for some users is the fact that all the comments are stored by IntenseDebate in their database, not on your own site, and there is no option to change this. However, if you can accept this it can also have advantages.

[Tim Green]

Update: The basic problems for implementing this have now been solved. Support for both IntenseDebate and Disqus comments are going to be included in the upcoming 1.40 update to the Premium Pack. See this posting in the new Help & Manual blog for details.

[Flutable]

Hi Tim,

I'd certainly like a tutorial for this if you have the time...even an outline of the steps would be handy.

Many thanks!

nick

[Tim Green]

Hi Nick,

It's already integrated in the current version of the Premium Pack but I'll see if I can get around to posting the basic principles in the next few days.