The Coded One

Disqus Comment System is a plugin that provides seamless integration between Joomla and the popular commenting system Disqus.

Installing the plugin is pretty straightforward but there are a few gotcha’s.

Troubleshooting

No comments/links are showing up.

• Check if the plugin is enabled.  (not enabled by default)
• Open template/html/com_content/article/default.php and make sure that the following lines exist.

<?php echo $this->article->event->beforeDisplayContent; ?>
...
<?php echo $this->article->event->afterDisplayContent; ?>

There is no Add New Comment section.

• Verify your plugin setting.  The subdomain value should only be the name and not the entire URL. ie. mysite.disqus.com

Adding an Exclude List

Currently, there’s no setting for enabling/disabling comments per article so I did a few hacks.

plugins/content/jw_disqus.xml – Add this line before the </param> tag

<param name="disqus_excludelist" type="text" default="" label="Exclude list" description="Do no show comments for articles having these ids (comma separated)" />

plugins/content/jw_disqus.php – Create a new function that checks if the id of the article is in the exclude list.

/**
  * Check if the id of the current article is included in the excludelist parameter
  */
function isExcluded($article_id){
	$plugin =& JPluginHelper::getPlugin('content', 'jw_disqus');
	$pluginParams = new JParameter( $plugin->params );	
	$disqus_excludelist = $pluginParams->def('disqus_excludelist','');
	if(in_array($article_id, explode(',', $disqus_excludelist))) {
	    return true;
	}
	return false;
}

Now simply return nothing in the callback functions if the article is in the exclude list.

/** just before content is output, returns output to be displayed */ 
function plgJWDisqus_onBeforeDisplayContent( &$row, &$params, $limitstart ){

    if(isExcluded($row->id)) {
	    return;
	}
...

/** just after content is output, returns output to be displayed */ 
function plgJWDisqus_onAfterDisplayContent( &$row, &$params, $limitstart ){

    if(isExcluded($row->id)) {
	    return;
	}
...

You should be all set after this.