Blogs: Pandammonia 
The world that revolves around Caity Ross.
Disqus in WordPress: don’t bother
Firstly, read the following link for some background information, then read on to see my experiences with it.
Disqus Wordpress Integration: Javascript vs API | Jangro.com.
I thought I might add Disqus to my blog, but it’s complete rubbish as far as integration with WordPress goes, as far as I can see. Like the author of the post at the end of the above link, I would rather not have javascript and would rather the comments were realised at the server side – this is precisely why I use PHP not javascript myself.
I consequently installed the API version of the Disqus plug-in for WordPress and activated it, only to discover it places the top of the comment input box at the bottom of the sidebar if the post is shorter than the sidebar content. This is irritating and looks ridiculous. I looked to see if I had any control over the CSS of the Disqus comments; apparently, I do – whoopee!
Or do I? I followed the instructions, and put the odd bit of javascript in the <head> part of the file, and then created special CSS file, then added some formatting for the tags as suggested. No change to anything. I wondered what was going on. I looked to see if the javascript was there – it was. I checked the validity of the CSS being used; it was fine, but mainly because it wasn’t finding the Disqus stuff. I checked the validity of the (X)HTML code; it wasn’t, of course, because it never is. This time, it wasn’t the usual ‘you’ve declared your script type wrongly’, as it usually is, but that there was a <link> in the middle of the <body> instead of in the head. Eh? I looked, and sure enough, there is one there, immediately above the comments code.
Hmm, I thought. That’s not right. At least it told me where the actual CSS file it uses lives. I looked at that – the size of it, and what an absolute mess! For something that’s supposed to be professional, you’d think ‘daniel’ would remove his name, and for the love of chocolate, why not use comments instead of making invalid tags when you want them to be unused but not removed? (At least daniel’s name was in comments.)
I can’t bear it, I really can’t. So I pressed the ‘uninstall’ button in the plug-in options, which took me to a page requesting username and password; this path actually led me to reinstall it – how pants is that? An uninstaller that misleads you into reinstalling it. So, I pressed the uninstall button again, and found it was still installed actually and was wanting me to configure it, so I deactivated it. I suppose to really uninstall it, I need to delete it from the plug-ins directory. I’m going to stick with ordinary WordPress comments for now, unless I can install the plain commenting system and modify my comments template file to use that.
On the plus side, it seems to work fine over at vColin.com.
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