Extending Blog Comment Functionality and Management

After some research I went ahead and upgraded the comment section of the Today’s Best Tools blog. I’ve integrated a third party commenting management application called Disqus. While it is a third party application me, Wordpress, and Disqus are one big happy family. The integration was pretty easy and the increased functionality is great. There are a few benefits of using Disqus on your blog that extend beyond other commenting extensions that I wanted to share with you today.

Disqus is pretty new to me too. I first noticed Disqus on Corvida’s SheGeeks Social Media blog a couple months ago. If you like Social Media and want to read intelligent posts about social media and web based technologies I would definitely recommend that you check out her site.

Integrate Disqus With a Variety of Platforms

A lot of times extending plugins and extensions to a blog is limited by the platform that you are using. This isn’t true with Disqus. You can integrate Disqus with a variety of different platforms including:

Wordpress
Blogger
Tumblr
Movable Type
TypePad

Furthermore other platforms have allowed the integration of the Disqus commenting extension to include:

Drupal
Joomla
RubyGem

The Disqus API is available to integrate with any site.

Manage Comments From Many Different Sites

If you manage different sites you can integrate Disqus into all of them and manage the comments from one dashboard or through the individual site dashboard, its your choice. This may be useful for your personal sites but it also allows you to manage comments from other sites as well. If you are a webmaster and manage multiple sites the Disqus platform can offer an easy way to manage many sites comments from the same interface saving you a lot of time.

Likewise you can view comments from the same user across a variety of sites. You can view the comments and follow the commenter in order to stay up with what they are commenting on. By viewing the profile of the commenter you can also subscribe to the individuals comments through RSS for easy tracking.

Disqus Functionality Offers Integration

You can easily integrate Seesmic into the comment section of your blog and your visitors can leave video comments. Not everyone is using Seesmic but video commenting represents an efficient way to communicate. Some visitors leave video comments and allowing them to do so on your site opens the door for better communication.

You can simply add other functionality with Disqus too. If you want to integrate trackbacks and avatars to the comments you can do so by selecting the options under settings in the admin panel.

There are a variety of extensions available that offer ways to manage comments on your sites and blogs. Disqus allows you greater functionality and makes managing your comments really easy.