Development of Joomla Commenting Component

  • Posted by Taras
  • July 16, 2008

One of the recent projects that we were involved in required us to create a commenting component that allowed to leave comments and upload variations to the original post.

Basically here are the specs:

  • Create or modify existing commenting component to allow creation of 2 types of comments
  • Variation and Comments are shown in the same list of comments
  • We need to be able to moderate the comments
  • Variations are comments that have Title, Description and upload field that allows the visitor to upload a text, doc or pdf document
  • Comments have Title, Description and Rating (users can only rate once per item)
We had a very limited time to implement these features, approximately 15 hours including styling the frontend.
So we began our investigation and quickly found that we don’t really have many options. There is JomComment & Joomla Comment. 
JomComment has a license that requires us to purchase a license per domain, so we would not be able to reuse or redistribute the code.
Joomla Comment is kinda messy.
So we decided to write something from scratch. The problem with writing something like this from scratch is that we would have to create an administrative interface that would allow us to moderate these comments, but this is time consuming.
So we devised a pretty ingenious plan that I think worked out pretty well.
  1. We decided to store all comments (title & description) as content items under Section & Category – Comments.
  2. We created a simple component for managing attachments. These attachments are linked to specific content items thereby allowing us to maintain a relationship to comments. ( cool thing is that we can actually use this separately outside of the commenting function )
  3. Rating was integrated using default joomla rating system. 
In the end, we were done on time and on budget. It’s a pretty neat solution, considering that that we were able to leverage all of the standard joomla code to be able to create this implementation and it’s actually not very hackish, which is kinda surprising.
I think Vitalik (our lead developer) and Alex (our lead CSS dev) did a great Job. 
Good Job guys!
Thanks :)

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July 16th, 2008
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Written by:
realcnbs
Posted on:
July 16, 2008 at 1:24 pm

it was fun :)
integration was a bit hacky but i like the way ot works )