Integrating a custom comment system in Ventrian NewsArticles

As I have taken up the plan to start blogging again about everything related to DotNetNuke and skinning. I started to look at what I wanted to use, the new DotNetNuke Blog module or my trusted Ventrian NewsArticles. Because of the great templated layout options I chose for Ventrian. At my normal day job HowardsHome we just completed a new news-portal that used a custom JavaScript based commenting system from JS-Kit, so I decided to use that one for my own site as well. Because of how Ventrian is setup this is very easy to implement yourself and in this blog post I will tell you how

Wat is Echo

Echo is a great ( $12 / $49 a year ) threaded comment system that allows people to comment on your site, share with others and use there OpenId, Twitter, Blogger etc login to log in and comment on your site. Full feature list

Integrating in the "View.Item" template

Because of the templating system all we need to do is add the following code to our "view.item" template

That's it we now have a custom comment system integrated with our Ventrian NewsArticles module. Now we can start with the next step, adding the comment count to the "listing.Item" template

Integrating comment count link in the "Listing.Item" template

Now that the new comment system integrated we need to add the comment count of this system and not the comment count of the original Ventrian comments to our articles. This can be done easily by pasting the following code in place of the original comment count link

That's it you now have the comment count replaced as well also. Note: If you use more NewsArticles modules on one page or you want to use this in the NewsArticlesLatest module as well its best to put a "Text/HTML" module at the bottom of your page and put the script tag in there and set the module to display on all pages.

Add a "Latest Comments" display to your portal.

A popular requested feature for the NewsArticles module is the possibility to display the latest comments. As of the day of writing there is no such option yet, but If you use this comment system we can fake that. You can get all comments from a site as an RSS feed. So all you need to do is add an "RSS" or an "XML/XSL" module to your portal and pass it the following RSS url.

As you can see this is quite easy to do, feel free to try out all the options below. You can login with a nr of accounts like Blogger, OpenID, Twitter, Google etc.