I had a look around, but couldn't find enough information.
I was wondering what the general consensus is for implementing Comments, Polls and questionnaires?
How is it done? do comments become children of the blog post document (that has been commented on) or should I be creating a folder for comments and relating them back to the posts?
And what technique should I be using to actually insert the comment/poll result in the database from the front end? - You know, how do I get from the user clicking the submit button - to creating the document in the backend?
Ideally I'd like to be able to get to the point of being able to write all code required myself - but I'm open to suggestions as long as they are open enough for me to learn from or style 100% my way.
There is the uComments package which gives you basically everything you need to get started on comments. AFAIK it's highly customisable. So far I've created commenting myself as sub nodes to the content that is being commented on, sometimes even with a sub-folder 'Comments' in between to distinguish from other sub nodes, e.g. FAQ, additional text pages. That works quite well and also performant as long as you only need the comments on that particular content node (which kind of makes sense). Should that not be the case and you need to traverse the tree quite heavily e.g. to get the latest 3 comments out of all content nodes then another implementation might make more sense.
Another very good option is to use 3rd party systems like Disqus to handle all your commenting, especially if your website doesn't require members otherwise and you don't want to add the whole login/forgotten password/registration/etc thing to your site just for this.
For polls I'd most likely look to implement 3rd party polling systems like surveymonkey.com. Otherwise sub nodes will work fine to define the individual questions and to hold the values. Same with questionnaires, although I would most likely not implement a questionnaire via Umbraco, however haven't really thought about it.
Hope that helps a bit,
Sascha
edit: completely forgot about the other question. How you want your workflow to be on the frontend side is pretty much up to you. You can write the comment box in a .Net usercontrol and have a regular postback, in the backend you can then insert new comments via .Net. Or you could build some ajax functionality and have a webservice or /base take a call as soon as the user hits submit. It basically depends on the user experience you want to create I'd say.
Thanks a lot sascha. I finally managed to use ucomment and get it all working - it seems to be great - a bit of css when I get the time and I'm a happy bunny ^.^
I was trying for a good month with the uComment package and after several failed attempts and a can't be bothered attitude recently towards web developement, it spontaneously started working.
I had some trouble with the javascript registers and after that came to the dashboard.config (thank god I'm better in xml than I am in umbraco) - it was super messed up due to the amount of times I had installed uComment and Blog4Umbraco.
You totally deserve the MVP Sascha, thanks again :)
Comment / Poll / Questionnaire Implementation
Hello again,
I had a look around, but couldn't find enough information.
I was wondering what the general consensus is for implementing Comments, Polls and questionnaires?
How is it done? do comments become children of the blog post document (that has been commented on) or should I be creating a folder for comments and relating them back to the posts?
And what technique should I be using to actually insert the comment/poll result in the database from the front end?
- You know, how do I get from the user clicking the submit button - to creating the document in the backend?
Ideally I'd like to be able to get to the point of being able to write all code required myself - but I'm open to suggestions as long as they are open enough for me to learn from or style 100% my way.
thanks in advance :)
Hi Shaun,
just my 2 cents:
There is the uComments package which gives you basically everything you need to get started on comments. AFAIK it's highly customisable. So far I've created commenting myself as sub nodes to the content that is being commented on, sometimes even with a sub-folder 'Comments' in between to distinguish from other sub nodes, e.g. FAQ, additional text pages. That works quite well and also performant as long as you only need the comments on that particular content node (which kind of makes sense). Should that not be the case and you need to traverse the tree quite heavily e.g. to get the latest 3 comments out of all content nodes then another implementation might make more sense.
Another very good option is to use 3rd party systems like Disqus to handle all your commenting, especially if your website doesn't require members otherwise and you don't want to add the whole login/forgotten password/registration/etc thing to your site just for this.
For polls I'd most likely look to implement 3rd party polling systems like surveymonkey.com. Otherwise sub nodes will work fine to define the individual questions and to hold the values. Same with questionnaires, although I would most likely not implement a questionnaire via Umbraco, however haven't really thought about it.
Hope that helps a bit,
Sascha
edit: completely forgot about the other question. How you want your workflow to be on the frontend side is pretty much up to you. You can write the comment box in a .Net usercontrol and have a regular postback, in the backend you can then insert new comments via .Net. Or you could build some ajax functionality and have a webservice or /base take a call as soon as the user hits submit. It basically depends on the user experience you want to create I'd say.
Hi, I had totally forgotten about this thread.
Thanks a lot sascha. I finally managed to use ucomment and get it all working - it seems to be great - a bit of css when I get the time and I'm a happy bunny ^.^
I was trying for a good month with the uComment package and after several failed attempts and a can't be bothered attitude recently towards web developement, it spontaneously started working.
I had some trouble with the javascript registers and after that came to the dashboard.config (thank god I'm better in xml than I am in umbraco) - it was super messed up due to the amount of times I had installed uComment and Blog4Umbraco.
You totally deserve the MVP Sascha, thanks again :)
/Smithy
Hey Smithy,
I very much like stuff that 'spontaneously starts working', that's the best kind. :)
Cheers for your kind words, glad you got it working now.
Sascha
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