Review: IntenseDebate
This post was written by derek on November 13th, 2008. Filed under Wordpress, featured, introducing
Update: I just noticed that as of yesterday, 13 November 2008, that IntenseDebate is no longer restricted to invite-only registration! So head on over to their site and grab an account today!
Yesterday I finally got an invite code for IntenseDebate and promptly installed it right here on my Wordpress blog. Here are my initial thoughts.
Installation
The installation process for IntenseDebate was really quite straight forward and simple for Wordpress, seeing as they have made it a plugin. For those of you familiar with WP and the use of plugins will have no problems installing this system. you simply download the plugin zip file, unzip, upload to your plugins directory, and activate. Then it’s just a matter of modifying a few settings (I left everything pretty much stock) and taking a look on your site to see how it looks.
That’s the simplified version, what I left out is, you have to let IntenseDebate ‘grab’ all the existing comments off of your site before it is fully installed. This process could take awhile if you have a well established blog with years of comments to sync. Being as I just relaunched mine about 2 months ago and I have relatively sparse comments, this process only took a few minutes to complete.
Also, a note in the way of compatibility with your theme: My theme is a completely one-off design / implementation by me, and as such, my styling for the unordered lists (<ul>) and list items (<li>) got in the way just a bit. You see, all of the comment elements, or most of them, are contained in an unordered list, well, contained in a lot of little unordered lists. My styling for the lists in my main content area, where the comments also reside, caused my comments to elements to have some residual images from the bullet point styling that I had included.
With ghosting, before CSS tweak (notice the ‘glowing’ circles around them)
Without ghosting, after CSS tweak
Notable Features
There are so many features included into IntenseDebate that I haven’t even had the chance to touch yet. I am just going to name a few of my favorites so far.
- Slick Interface / Layout - I really like the way that the comments are displayed on the page. The incorporation of the different elements is seamless and non-obtrusive, yielding a very pleasant and intuitive user experience.
- Threaded Comments - This feature works similar to a lot of other systems, most notably, Digg. This means that users can truly have a conversation in your comments, which greatly adds to the community feel of any site.
- Rating System - I don’t think that this feature needs much of an explanation, there are ‘thumbs up’ and ‘thumbs down’ (digg or bury anyone?) links on the right side of a comment that allow the user to voice whether they think that the particular comment is relevant, poignant, etc. The only problem that I potentially see with this is, with such a small user base, will arbitrary ratings mess with the overall delivery of the comments? I guess only time will tell.
- Report Comment - The ability to have your community evaluate / moderate comments could be a huge plus / weight lifted, for the owner of the site. Given the great community that seems to develop around these ‘Tech-centric’ blogs, I feel that this feature can and will be huge!
- OpenID Support - Integrating OpenID support might seem like a no-brainer to some, but I think that IntenseDebate ’shipping’ with this feature is ingenious! Also, now that Google has made all Gmail addresses work as OpenID’s, this will only make it easier for users to be a logged in member of the discussion.
Final, Initial Thoughts
After playing around with this system, even for just a short period of time, I can see that this will prove highly useful to me and others. I can honestly say though, that this would be far more useful for a site that has a large readership, but, that is also what I hope to grow this into.
Also, it should be known, that Automattic, the company behind Wordpress and Akismet, has acquired this little startup and I can only imagine that it will be fully integrated into a future release near you.
How important is commenting to you? Do you think the features that I’ve outlined make a difference over the default system? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
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