jekyll-oldcomments

Do you have an old wordpress blog? Are you migrating it to Jekyll? Tired of spam? Don't want to moderate comments anymore, but you don't want to lose all those comments of people who have contributed so far?

The Jekyll-oldcomments gem is for you! You can use this gem to extract all the comments from your old wordpress website and present them on your new jekyll site (along with an explanation on why you're not accepting new comments).

If you still want to allow comments with Jekyll, there are still many solutions for that. This isn't one of them.

Installation

To install the current release, run the following:

gem install jekyll-oldcomments

To install from source:

git clone https://github.com/sumdog/jekyll-oldcomments
cd jekyll-oldcomments
gem build jekyll-oldcomments.gemspec
gem install jekyll-oldcomments-<version>.gem

If you need to customize this plugin, you can also clone the source and copy the oldcomments.rb into your Jekyll _plugins folder. If you come up with some useful additions, pull requests are encouraged.

Extracting Wordpress Comments

You will need to use the built in Wordpress export. Go to Tools>Export in the Wordpress admin concert and export all data. It should generate an XML file. You can then use the following command to create a _comments directory.

wp_comments2jekyll <wordpress-export.xml>

If you have installed the gem as a local user, you may need a full path like the following:

$HOME/.gem/ruby/2.1.0/bin/wp_comments2jekyll <wordpress-export.xml>

Usage with Jekyll

Add the gem to your Jekyll _config.yml like so:

gems:
  - jekyll-oldcomments

This plugin expects a file in _includes that's named comments.html. It should look something like the following:

{% if comments %}
<h3 id="comments-header">Comments</h3>
{% endif %}
{% for comment in comments %}
  <div class="comment">
    <div class="comment_header">
      <span class="comment_author">
        {% if comment.meta.author_url %}
          <a class="comment_author_url" href="{{ comment.meta.author_url }}">
        {% endif %}
        {{ comment.meta.author }}
        {% if comment.meta.author_url %}</a>{% endif %}
      </span>
      <span class="comment_date">
        {{ comment.meta.date  | date: "%Y-%m-%d" }}
      </span>
    </div>
    <div>
      {{ comment.text }}
    </div>
  </div>
{% endfor %}
{% if comments %}
<div class="comment closed">
  Comments are closed. <a href="http://example.org/comments">Why?</a>
</div>
{% endif %}

Then within your _post.html, you can include a {% oldcomments %} to render the comments.html. The following is an example:

---
layout: default
---
<section class="post">

  <header class="post-header">
    <h2 class="post-title">{{ page.title }}</h2>
    <p class="post-meta">{{ page.date | date: "%b %-d, %Y" }}{% if page.author %} • {{ page.author }}{% endif %}{% if page.meta %} • {{ page.meta }}{% endif %}</p>
  </header>

  <article class="post-content">
    {{ content }}

    <div id="comments">
      {% old_comments %}
    </div>

  </article>

</section>

Example

I currently use this plugin on PenguinDreams.org. the following is an example of a page with comments generated:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/running-beans-that-use-application-server-datasources-locally/

Help/Support

If you run into issues or have a question, add an issue to our issue tracker. Pull requests are welcome.