Migrating to django-comments-xtd

If your project uses django-contrib-comments you can easily plug django-comments-xtd to add extra functionalities like comment confirmation by mail, comment threading and follow-up notifications.

This section describes how to make django-comments-xtd take over comments support in a project in which django-contrib-comments tables have received data already.

Preparation

First of all, install django-comments-xtd:

(venv)$ cd mysite
(venv)$ pip install django-comments-xtd

Then edit the settings module and change your INSTALLED_APPS so that django_comments_xtd and django_comments are listed in this order. Also change the COMMENTS_APP and add the EMAIL_* settings to be able to send mail messages:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'django_comments_xtd',
    'django_comments',
    ...
]
...
COMMENTS_APP = 'django_comments_xtd'

# Either enable sending mail messages to the console:
EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend'

# Or set up the EMAIL_* settings so that Django can send emails:
EMAIL_HOST = "smtp.mail.com"
EMAIL_PORT = "587"
EMAIL_HOST_USER = "alias@mail.com"
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = "yourpassword"
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = "Helpdesk <helpdesk@yourdomain>"

Edit the urls module of the project and mount django_comments_xtd’s URLs in the path in which you had django_comments’ URLs, django_comments_xtd’s URLs includes django_comments’:

from django.conf.urls import include, url

urlpatterns = [
    ...
    url(r'^comments/', include('django_comments_xtd.urls')),
    ...
]

Now create the tables for django-comments-xtd:

(venv)$ python manage.py migrate

Populate comment data

The following step will populate XtdComment’s table with data from the Comment model. For that purpose you can use the populate_xtdcomments management command:

(venv)$ python manage.py populate_xtdcomments
Added 3468 XtdComment object(s).

You can pass as many DB connections as you have defined in DATABASES and the command will run in each of the databases, populating the XtdComment’s table with data from the comments table existing in each database.

Now the project is ready to handle comments with django-comments-xtd.