Quick start guide

To get started using django-comments-xtd follow these steps:

  1. pip install django-comments-xtd

  2. Enable the “sites” framework by adding 'django.contrib.sites' to INSTALLED_APPS and defining SITE_ID. Visit the admin site and be sure that the domain field of the Site instance points to the correct domain (localhost:8000 when running the default development server), as it will be used to create comment verification URLs, follow-up cancellations, etc.

  3. Add 'django_comments_xtd' and 'django_comments', in that order, to INSTALLED_APPS.

  4. Set the COMMENTS_APP setting to 'django_comments_xtd'.

  5. Set the COMMENTS_XTD_MAX_THREAD_LEVEL to N, being N the maximum level of threading up to which comments will be nested in your project.

    # 0: No nested comments:
    #  Comment (level 0)
    # 1: Nested up to level one:
    #  Comment (level 0)
    #   |-- Comment (level 1)
    # 2: Nested up to level two:
    #  Comment (level 0)
    #   |-- Comment (level 1)
    #        |-- Comment (level 2)
    COMMENTS_XTD_MAX_THREAD_LEVEL = 2
    

    The thread level can also be established on a per <app>.<model> basis by using the COMMENTS_XTD_MAX_THREAD_LEVEL_BY_APP_MODEL setting. Use it to establish different maximum threading levels for each model. ie: no nested comments for quotes, up to thread level 2 for blog stories, etc.

  6. Set the COMMENTS_XTD_CONFIRM_EMAIL to True to require comment confirmation by email for no logged-in users.

  7. Run manage.py migrate to create the tables.

  8. Add the URLs of the comments-xtd app to your project’s urls.py:

    urlpatterns = [
        ...
        url(r'^comments/', include('django_comments_xtd.urls')),
        ...
    ]
    
  9. Customize your project’s email settings:

    EMAIL_HOST = "smtp.mail.com"
    EMAIL_PORT = "587"
    EMAIL_HOST_USER = "alias@mail.com"
    EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = "yourpassword"
    DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = "Helpdesk <helpdesk@yourdomain>"
    
  10. To allow a quick start django-comments-xtd makes use of twitter-bootstrap. From django-comments-xtd v2.3 on it uses Twitter-Bootstrap v4. From django-comments-xtd v1.7.1 to v2.2 it uses Twitter-Bootstrap v3. If you want to build your own templates, use the comments templatetag module, provided by the django-comments app. Create a comments directory in your templates directory and copy the templates you want to customise from the Django Comments Framework. The following are the most important:

    • comments/list.html, used by the render_comments_list templatetag.
    • comments/form.html, used by the render_comment_form templatetag.
    • comments/preview.html, used to preview the comment or when there are errors submitting it.
    • comments/posted.html, which gets rendered after the comment is sent.
  11. Add extra settings to control comments in your project. Check the available settings in the Django Comments Framework and in the django-comments-xtd app.

These are the steps to quickly start using django-comments-xtd. Follow to the next page, the Tutorial, to read a detailed guide that takes everything into account. In addition to the tutorial, the Demo projects implement several commenting applications.