Create a disqus App for DNN in 5 minutes

What I really, really love about 2sxc is they way you can leverage existing tools and integrate them into DNN in minutes. 

So I really needed a commenting feature for 2sxc.org and for the blog I have there. I had created a simple, multi-language blog app a few months ago and I needed a trivial way to add commenting. Now I know from past experience that this isn't trivial - with robot and spam-detection, user login, threads and more - commenting is something that looks so simple you could implement it in a few hours, but reality will hit you hard. 

So I figured it's time to go cloud-style and just use a free, external commenting solution. Since I spend a lot of time in projects with a node/grunt/angular style, I see a lot of sites using disqus. So I figured it's time to try it myself. For the impatient - you can download the disqus app for DNN here. 

So as a potential disqus-user, here's what you do:

1. Create an account on disqus.com and activate it (verify your e-mail)
2. Add an HTML-fragment to your site, but...
3. ...it should have a few customizations to ensure unique page assignment

Fairly simple. Many CMSs have a plugin available, but DNN does not. But since it's so easy to add HTML fragments as a 2sxc-view/template, I just 

1. created a new App called disqus
2. did not create any content-types as they are not neded
3. created a token-view called "disqus" and added the HTML
4. replaced the page-id in the source code with [Tab:FullUrl] and another placeholder with [Tab:TabPath]

And that was it - voila, it works. In less than 2 minutes I had a disqus app. So what about the remaining 3 minutes? I needed those to make the app configurable so I could share it with you. The original code provided by discus had my personal domain 2sxc-org.disqus.com in the source - which wouldn't work when I share the app with others. So I spend another 3 minutes to

1. Go to the app-setup and add a setting called DomainKey, which I then filled with 2sxc-org.disqus.com (my key)
2. Adapt the template to use [App:Settings:DomainKey].disqus.com
3. Test
4. Publish

Is that it? It is for those 5 minutes. I then spend another 5 to add some more cool features, but more about that another day :). 

Love from Switzerland,
iJungleboy